"When one rejects spirituality, one loses contact with a critical component of the human experience. To reject one’s family religion is like rejecting a brand of shoes. To reject religion in general is like rejecting shoes in general. To reject spirituality is like rejecting your feet."
"Spirituality and religion are sometimes confused for each other. Spirituality need not include a concept of a god or a belief in miracles. It is an openness to awareness of connection and of things greater than oneself."
The essay is about those times when terrible inexplicable things happen that shake our faith. Even great spiritual role models like Mother Teresa question their faith, and like them our challenge is to develop our own faith, fall down and get up again, so we can join in the dance.
Soren Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling
"Most people live dejectedly in worldly sorrow and joy; they are the ones who sit along the wall and do not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and possess elevation. They make the movements upward, and fall down again; and this too is no mean pastime, nor ungraceful to behold."
The option to taking a leap of faith and believing in the unknowable is to believe (since there is no proof either way) that all there is the here and now - that which can be seen and proven to exist. In this world view there is no place for poets, dreamers or mystics. No magic, no miracles and ultimately a very diminished sense of hope since we are living in a temporal plane - just a blip in eternity - scratching out a living, dying and then gone.
Kierkegaard wrote about that world view in "Fear and Trembling" -
"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power - which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated, lay hidden beneath all–what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw–how empty then and comfortless life would be!"Ultimately I'm a pragmatist, and I believe that by working on my faith...maybe even clinging to my faith - I have a better chance to do things, withstand things, show up at times when it's difficult and generally cultivate a sense of hope, calmness and joyfulness. Not every day and not in every circumstance but ultimately I believe that faith works because it expands the space we live in providing for infinite possibilities, reduces our fears, and allows us to get outside ourselves once in awhile so we can connect with, and maybe sometimes help, others.
I have hope....
