The Gaps

By Sarah Ban Breathnach

Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to hear I maybe wrong?
-JANE AUSTEN

It's difficult for me to write about faith without also writing about doubt.

I'd love to write a meditation on the comfort of absolute faith, the faith of Abraham walking in the desert with his beautiful little boy, Isaac, on their way to make a burnt offering to God.

They have the fire, they have the wood. But where is the lamb? Isaac asks his father. God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, Abraham tells the son he prayed seven decades for.

Of course, this being a story about absolute faith, God does provide. After an altar is built, the wood is arranged, the child is bound, and the knife is unsheathed, an angel intervenes. God provides.

Faith breaks a heart in order to make it Whole. But I can't write about the comfort of an absolute faith like Abraham's because you'd never have found me walking in the desert with fire, wood, my child, and no lamb.

For Abraham, there were no gaping black holes of doubt. Or were there?

Not even as he held the knife aloft? Once a friend told me of a conversation she'd had with another mutual friend on God, faith, and doubt. In passing, she mentioned that they both wished that they possessed my faith.

I have no recollection of the rest of the conversation.

I do recall, however, my need to hang up the phone, shocked that anyone should believe my fragile faith worth emulating.

Annie Dillard tells that the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel was wary of those who hadn't floundered in the gaps before finding their way back across deserts of the heart. "The gaps are the thing," she points out. "The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once blind man unbound." I hope to God she's right.

For perhaps the gaps are what make faith possible, especially when the pain is unbearable. If there were no doubt, why would we need faith? Perhaps the doubts must be acknowledged, accepted, embraced, and pushed past before our faith is strong enough, not just to talk about, but to sustain.

It's okay if you hold your breath when you leap. Just don't look down.

"Faith is not being sure. It is not being sure, but betting with your last
cent," Mary Jean Irion reassures us in Yes, World. "Faith is not making religious-sounding noises in the daytime. It is asking your innermost self questions at night-and then getting up and going to work."

Source: Simple Abundance - A Daybook of Comfort & Joy