From Thinking About God, continued . . .

     Cardinal Luciani created a world for himself in which God was the center of meaning.  This world was his reality.  How did he create it?  By believing in God.  Faith for Cardinal Luciani was to believe in God and construct a portrait of a world that is guided and given meaning by this God.  The cardinal "saw" (perhaps a better term is "sensed") God in his experience, then used what he "saw" to make his painting of the world.  His faith in God was his way of seeing, of looking at the world, his way of building his perception of what was real and true.  It circumscribed and controlled his view of reality.
     Conversely, Rob Hall made a world in which he was the determinant of what was real and true.  He saw through the lens of who he thought he was.  And, it seems (although we will never know for sure), he continued to believe this perception of the world until he died.  Though faith is belief, it is belief that comes out of how we see.
     But faith doesn't just see.  It looks at what it sees.  And it thinks about what it sees.  Faith knows that merely seeing is not enough.  It knows that in order to see—really see—it needs to look into and examine what it sees.  Faith looks at what is there, then looks for something more, something that is less than obvious, something that might enhance or explain what is.  It knows that what is apparent is not always all there is to be seen, or what is most important.  Faith reads between the lines, studies the fine print.  It ponders the inchoate, the undivulged, the unrevealed.  It is a seeing that tries to see even when there seems to be nothing to be seen, a seeing that understands that what we see is dependent on how we see—and what we do not, as well.
     Faith is always trying to expand the boundaries of what we think we know.  It is always seeking to see more.  Faith believes that it will always see because it believes there is always more to be seen.
     In the account of Jesus' resurrection in the gospel of John, we read that when Peter and John came to the tomb on Easter morning, although they both saw the empty tomb, they didn't "see" it in the same way.  Peter, the account says, "beheld" the discarded grave cloth, whereas John "saw" them and, the passage records, believed.  The writer uses a different Greek word to describe how each apostle "saw."  Peter and John saw the same thing, but only one understood what he saw.  He was the one who could really "see."
     A faith that sees, however, is not enough.  We must be able to trust what we see.
     Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was seventy-five years old, Genesis 12 tells us, when God called him to go forth from Haran (a city in northeastern Syria) into Palestine.  "I will make you a great nation," God told him, "and I will bless you and make your name great."
     Though he probably wondered how at seventy-five years of age he would ever give birth to a great nation, Abraham went anyway.  He believed in God and trusted that the way God saw the world and his life was worthwhile, good, and true.
     Some years later, God spoke to Abraham again, and assured him, again, that he would father a child, an offspring from whom millions of people would eventually come.  Abraham looked at himself, then at Sarah.  But he took God at his word.  Against all earthly logic, Abraham trusted God.  But that’s the way of faith:  choosing to see when we cannot.
     Many years hence, when Abraham was ninety-nine years old, God sent three angels to tell him that he and his wife Sarah should expect a child the next year.  Abraham would be one hundred; Sarah would be ninety.  Sarah laughed, but, again, Abraham trusted the way that God saw the world.
     The next year, just as God had promised, Isaac was born.  Abraham had the faith that saw even when it could not.  He believed without seeing.  So deep was his faith in God that he was willing to believe Him even when there was no reason to, because for him there was in fact every reason to.  Abraham believed that God would deliver.  He was willing to go with God without any evidence that what God had promised him would come about, because he trusted the way that God told him to see.

     (More tomorrow . . . )

From Thinking About God:  Meditations on a Considered Life, 2007, William E. Marsh