Years ago, I wrote about the need to take action in order to have hope. We think of hope, perhaps, firstly, as a purely theological concept, and, secondly, as an abstract mental state. It’s more concrete than that. I leave it to minds greater and more disciplined than mine to elucidate all the particulars, but I think it demonstrable that as embodied creatures in time, our hope is manifest in the way we live our daily lives. It cannot be otherwise. If we do not act on hope, we do not have hope.
So, too, with faith. There is a tendency to set aside faith from all our other habits and decisions in life. Faith occupies a sphere beyond ordinary concerns. There is the realm of logic and decisions about where to live and whom to marry, and then there is the question of God and the soul which we can deal with someday if we have the time. And, yet, simple faith is required of us even in the most mundane areas of life. Apologists like to toss around the example of a map: how do you know it represents what is really there? And the can of diced tomatoes. How can you be certain there are, in fact, edible prepared tomatoes in the can and not something else?
The short answer is faith.
Our precipitous cultural decline is a crisis of faith. While there was once a robust narrative that marriage and children were a blessing, a foundation for a good life, we now have people increasingly questioning. Their reasons for questioning are in many cases understandable. Meeting miserable people who happen to have spouses (or former spouses) and children, you run the risk of assuming that their misery is due to their circumstances. How rarely is that truly the case!
By rejecting the beautiful story that a fruitful marriage will make you happy, many people in our society embark on alternative lifestyles seeking happiness, fulfillment, or simply to fill the hours before death. The chances you will discover something that someone else did not already try and find wanting in the past several thousand years are slim.
Why not follow a well-worn path to discover the meaning and purpose that others have found there? This requires faith. While reading “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice” by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, I was struck by how inescapable their ambivalence had become. Berg insisted in the afterward about having her daughter that, really, the experience hadn’t changed her at all. How exasperating! After all that indecision! But, if her starting point was that the subject was worthy of ambivalence, it’s not surprising that in the experience she noticed all the things that one could be ambivalent about.
It’s not as though marrying and having children will automatically transform you. The stages of life must be approached with a certain openness and commitment to seep into you and work the kind of change that people mean when they talk about being made new in marriage and motherhood.
There’s a funny story that demonstrates the way tradition works. A woman made a roast for her family often. Each time she made it, she cut it shorter and put part in a separate roasting pan. One day, a guest asked why she used two pans when the roast could have easily fit in one. “I don’t know,” the woman responded, perplexed. “That’s just how my mother and grandmother always did it.”
When she asked her grandmother the next time she saw her why she always cut the roast, the grandmother laughed and explained that she only had a small pan. Most of us don’t have a grandmother to ask questions of. Those of us with living parents and grandparents may be trying to live in an order that they never sought to pursue. Following the patterns of a good and fulfilling life may lead us to incorporate certain nonessentials and bungle some things pretty badly. But following that outline, having faith in people who came before us, will likely save us lots of heartache.
If faith is believing in things unseen, pursuing a happy family life will require faith for many people.
