There's a song that's been wracking my head to escape for the past eight hours now. It's got a beautiful melody line, but it's only intervals to my mind. It has no key. It has no lyrics. There's no supporting chord structure, and it's very complete in and of itself which leaves it very little prospect as far as far as continuation of an idea. But I've worked with this type of melody before, and I know that it is far to delicate for me to force the idea, so it inhabits this place of tension between completeness and being able to move on to new tonalities and ideas. It's inspiring other avenues of thought and musical processes, but they are merely phantasms with indistinct forms refusing to coagulate into something I can grasp onto and wrestle into place. Given my musical background of punk and hardcore, this is something I can usually do with regularity when it comes to my musical ideas as they are thought of, bent into a new form, and placed neatly into a form and finished with a rough texture before being polished up to be presentable. There is nothing more frustrating than an illusive melody.
And this is where my brain begins to go all over creation. This melody is in some ways the perfect metaphor for a lot of pieces of my life. My life is unfinished, and far from being there. It is far from set as well. I have some notions about where I'm going and how to get there, but there is a level of the fantastic involved because there is no ten year plan. I don't even have a five year plan. I can't even plan a month out, who knows where I will be ideologically, physically, or metaphysically. Yet my life feels complete, almost as if there is nothing after this moment right here. Like this melody that absorbs me for a few brief seconds, my life is focused on the here and now and there is nothing else. While fulfilling, there's a yearning for a more complete goal.
The melody in my head ends on the fourth pitch of the scale, which if you know anything about music begs for resolution downward to the third. It's not a major seventh or ninth for some colour in a chord before resolving wholesomely to the expected, known central focus. It's a note that hangs in the air, begging to be let down. Until it does there's no rest. Yet this is the note that my melody ends on. All my plans in my life, all my ideas and dreams are this note. They are begging to resolve into a larger notion. But, like the melody, there is only the hint of a larger piece. The melody is self contained and I wish you could hear it like I do.
And this is where my life is. It is self contained, the ends and the means unto itself. It justifies itself, it's focused and has meaning and purpose, but it hints at something more. Like the chords I am so desperately searching for, I know there's a plan and in due time, perhaps it will be my reward to know what it is and how I'm going to get there. But there are no lyrics that guide my ideas in a direct manner. There is no direction that is being pointed to by a seventh or a fourth. The fourth has a clear resolution point: the third. However, when it ends a phrase, there's this sense of something more and knowledge of something that belongs there. When it ends a melody, we all know where it should go, but if it doesn't go there it's almost like a lost pitch. That's where I'm at. A lot pitch, knowing where I need to go and where I should be with no way to get there.
But my faith and trust is in God alone, and He that has a put together a good work will see it's completion.
Faith without doubts is blind: it can only exist where absolute certainty is impossible. My faith is no doubt a shocker to those who know me, although not entirely incredible. I am not a religious man, religions to me are things that start wars and cloister people into pigeon holed thought processes that create unity at the cost of truly meaningful existences. Personally I have struggled with many of the big questions such as the problem of pain and the existence of God, but my thoughts tonight turn to the nature of faith.
Faith by it's own definition requires a lack of surety. My thesis rings true on many fronts. I believe that true Christians are not called to absolute surety, as this would mean that what we believe in can be empirically derived. While it is true that to a certain extent that truth can be empirical, the very fabric of Christianity hinges on many things that defy physics or other scientific disciplines that consequently put accounts (literal or figurative) more into the realm of the fantastic than cold hard empirically defined reality that we are so accustomed to. The very crux of my faith (that a man came here, faced a violent and brutal death that left little doubt that he was truly dead, then was seen by several people to be completely alive and bearing only scars of the event) is indeed by its nature a paradox of science.
Faith is a step towards understanding. Even evolution is subject to this gap. The further you study the patterns of thought involved in evolutionary biology you discover that we look for links between species. This assumes evolution. Yet links are found and then are assumed to be proof that evolution is true. This is a fallacy of circular reasoning. We are all subject to it. We have to assume something is true before we can begin to search for truths to support our beliefs. I am not here to argue whether evolution is valid or suspect, merely to point out that even in something accepted many is plagued by this beast of faith.
But blind is not the faith all Christians are called for. The blind faith we are trained in as children in one ideal or another (and the process is not different than for those who teach any number of secular thoughts). My faith is open to interpretation, a level of maturity that says that some things are meant to be accepted for now until a better answer presents itself. I have personally seen in myself a change from many ideas of theology that have been debunked by simply applying low level reasoning to Biblical passages on which Christianity is supposed to be based. I see no where in Scripture that says "Do not doubt the existence of God, it is folly and you will be punished for it." I see a man incredulous that his best friend was brutally decimated three days previous to his hearing that he is alive again, so much so that his friend confronts him and doesn't invite him to put his finger through the holes in his hands, he commands it. There is a place in Christianity for searchers. In fact, it would seem that it encourages us. It teaches us that there are false realities that will be taught to us by influential and usually highly educated and seemingly knowledgeable people, but we are able to open the Bible and see what God has said and create our own cohesive narrative. Granted, this does not lower the Bible to one of those cheap "create your own adventure" novels we read as kids. But it does mean that no special knowledge is needed to determine what the Bible says. It is freely available to whoever would read and understand it.
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