"God does not need too much wire to keep Him there, just a thin vein, with blood pushing back and forth in it, and some love."   So observed Pulitzer Prize winner poet Anne Sexton, who died in 1974 (this selection comes from her poem "Small Wire").
     It's no secret that Sexton all her life struggled with questions of identity, her own, the world's, God's.  In poem after poem she wondered aloud what the self and life meant, what it meant to live a life that often seemed so patently real yet so frustratingly futile. In this line from "Small Wire," she makes a telling point about our identity with or in God. If God is there, what keeps him there?  Us or God?
     Well, one might say, God is there whether we believe him to be or not.  True enough, but as a person with whom I was talking recently noted, how much of this belief do we owe to God and how much do we owe to ourselves?  In other words, if only a thin vein connects us to God, does this mean that belief is intrinsically tenuous, or does it mean that genuine belief requires very little of us?
     I might say that it's both.  Because belief, that is, the belief of faith, is inherently one rooted in incomplete knowledge, knowledge, as Paul puts it, "in part," it is indeed tenuous.  Yet because when distilled to its most fundamental components faith is exceedingly simple--trust and obey--it quite requires little of us:  we need only believe.
     Put these two together, however, and we have a challenge greater than all others: loving one whom we cannot see but who loves us more than all those whom we can.