Certainty.
This, at bottom, is what everybody is after. Certainty. An unflinching conviction that you know what the hell is going on. It’s the desire that drives religion, that drives political ideology, that drives even our own personal life and career choices.
The desire to be certain.
People will slave away at a job they hate because it provides a stable income. A certainty about how much money will be coming in each month.
Dogmatic adherence to political ideologies is possible because those systems propose a stable narrative about how one should live. Certainty about your role as a citizen, certainty about the purpose of government, certainty about the entire point of civilization.
Religion likewise allows people to know, for sure, if they are good or if they are bad. To know that there is life after death, and that it is a good one. To be certain what the purpose of life is, and the universe, and everything, and to know it’s something more intellectually satisfying than 42.
Certainty.
The source of all currency is certainty. Guarantee. Collateral. A credit score. Look here, if you sign something just how likely are you to pay it?
People need to be certain of you too, see?
Are you reliable? You’re not allowed to change, oh no! You’d better not be different today than you were yesterday. People just won’t stand for it. Listen here Joe you’d better not flake. We need to be able to count on you when the chips are down Sally. You need to be stable, everybody expects it. You need to be stable even though nothing else is.
Certainty.
The thing everybody wants but can never have.
It’s an idol. Certainty is the opposite of faith.
Oh, people will offer you an illusion of certain. Sure. But only if you don’t push on it too much. Please, sir, do not peak behind the curtain. If you do, kindly pay no attention to the man there pulling on the levers. This is why people don’t like having deep conversations. Much too dangerous. Anytime anybody starts getting too philosophical there had better be somebody there to “lighten the mood” by being a bit silly or buying everybody another round. Else we all might have to admit it you see. Admit that we don’t know.
We don’t know a damned thing.
These days there’s scarcely any refuge even in facts. Or, really, “facts” so called, for that is all they are. Dressed up opinions. Dressed up opinions that, especially in this day and age, seem to change all the time. What we are living through now in the West is a collapse of certainty, a lack of facts. Institutions are no longer trustworthy. Our religions seem dubious. Politics is the realm of the buffoon and our relationships the stuff of boffins. “Science” changes by the hour. Today, masks are useless, tomorrow they are paramount. Yesterday vaccination prevented infection, today the definition is different. When I was a kid dinosaurs did not have feathers. Somewhere along the line they acquired them. They’re actually chickens now, don’t you know? Butter used to be bad for you. Red meat caused heart attacks. Smoking was okay and then it wasn’t. Sunscreen is necessary but now it also gives you cancer. Being born with a penis used to mean you were a boy. Science. The realm of shifting sand.
And so you can’t have certainty.
You have to let go.
I mean that. You have to let go. It’s the only way. Let go of that to which you cling and trust that whatever gods may be are there to catch you when you fall. There is no terra firma. All you have is the leap of faith. In my own searching I have found that every belief, if pushed, falls down. Nothing is solid. Everything is but a phantom of an illusion of a ghost.
What do?
I’ll tell you what I did.
I became Catholic. I became Catholic because I was looking for certainty. That was the promise. That was the sell.
“The church hasn’t changed in 2000 years.”
“The church can and has spoken infallibly about right and wrong,”
It seems laughable now but some years ago I could be told, and actually believe, that “The church does not change.” Some even went so far as to assure me that, “If the Church changed, she would not be the Church.”
Well, then, by that metric, she’s not the church. Product not as advertised. Whom do I see about getting my money back?
In short order after my conversion everything began to change. The death penalty was first. A teaching which Catholic theologians and defenders had gone to bat for, often in contorted flips of logic, was now out. The death penalty was in a few weeks ago, even morally obligatory in some cases. But now it’s not anymore. Just… cause. “Not morally permissible” or something. Whatever that means. All those very certain arguments priests and pastors had made in defense of it. Gone. Washed away. Tears in rain.
The Lord’s prayer changed too. Funny that. You’d think that they’d have gotten the translation of the one prayer uttered from the mouth of Jesus correct over the past 2000 years, but no. Somehow even that could not be settled. Oh and the pope worshiped an idol that time. Somehow he’s still the pope. I had been told this couldn’t happen.
So it goes.
I’m not mad about it. Not anymore. Seeking certainty in the Catholic Church was as foolhardy as seeking it with the Baptists, Aristotle, the Green Party or the GOP. The fault was with me. I didn’t want God and I didn’t want Truth.
I wanted Certainty.
Not the same thing.
Time after time in my life I went seeking for something rigid, unflexing, and true. Something that would offer stability and security in an unstable and insecure world. But always what I presumed to be solid turned out to be made of paper. Wet paper at that. But really, how could it be otherwise? How could anything be solid in a world like ours? A world of transience. Where everything is fading away. Everything passing from moment to moment like a dream. As Shakespeare said:
“And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
the solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit — shall dissolve.
And like this insubstantial pageant fade,
and Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Shakespeare
The poets are always at their best when they speak thus. On the impermanence of things. The perpetual passing away of the cosmos and all that are within it. Like a river flowing always to the sea, time catches everything in its current and washes it away. Yesterday’s battles, losses and victories, where are they now? Of what use? Gone are the heroes. The philosophers are no more. Bones all of them. Brittle bones becoming dust. The mighty pronouncements of the sages, the declarations of the saints, the righteous ramblings of the prophets… what do they matter? Where are they and to whom can they speak? Us? We whose existence seems but a flash of light between two eternal darknesses. A brief awareness between the nursery and the crematorium. A little life, rounded on each end with a sleep.
In this space, in this little minuscule space of seventy or eighty years… we think we can be certain. Certainty, in such a span of time against all the vastness of eternity and the infinite black of the night sky and all its stars.
Nonsense.
It is not possible.
And the search for certainty will only lead you, time and time again, into despair. For Doubt is very clever. And for everything you can know there are a thousand things that you cannot.
I think Jesus let go. As Chesterton said, Christianity is the only religion where God himself became an atheist. There, on the cross, abandoned by everyone on earth he knew he was also abandoned by everyone in Heaven. “Eli eli lama sabachthani,” he said. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For a moment, God lost faith in God.
Not even Jesus could be certain. “If it is possible…” he prayed, “take this cup from me.”
Is it possible? Can this cup pass? Must I drink it Father?
He doesn’t know. Certainty illuded even the Messiah.
At the end of your life you will be brought to the edge of a great abyss. Death. A darkness from which there seems no return. You will then be thrust, perhaps calmly, perhaps violently, over its edge. And you will fall. In that moment, you will know if you have faith or not for in that moment there will be nothing to do but hope. Nothing to do but fall into the darkness and hope that you land on a pillow of soul saving love.
That’s what faith is. To jump, and hope that you are caught.
It’s only way to die.
Paradoxically, it’s also the only way to live.
You always write exactly what I need to hear at the time I need it.I thought this was one of your finest pieces. God bless you and thank you.
Certainty is faith. Christ tells us to have faith in God for all else is a foundation of sand. The worlds institutions are collapsing because they are built on sand and the storm is raging. Its all falling apart. Only those whose foundation is the rock of Jesus will withstand the storm. Christ prays psalm 22 on the cross not because he doubts himself but because he has come to suffer for us and with us. God asks us to have the kind of certainty in him that we would take up our own cross and give up our life to him. The winnowing fork is in his hand and we will soon see if we are wheat or chaff.