Doubt

This is my year of doubt. More than any other time in my life uncertainty, trepidation, insecurity, and all associated psychosomatic bedfellows have harassed my footsteps like a starving stray dog. And yet, so very interestingly, this has been my year of signs, in the purest divine sense.

Let me tell you about signs, ye contemplative theists. Signs do nothing to crystallize faith. At their most useful, signs satisfy the insatiable hunger pangs of doubt, but only if this doubt has a glimmer of faith to save it. They've pulled me out of an extrinsic depression, where my center was sanctified through faith and I still had a hope that couldn't reach the periphery of myself, at very important times. I doubted to the point where I was choked with my thoughts; then a sigh became my prayer, and lo, an impossible coincidence drifted from the world and saved me. Euphoria was reborn, and everything seemed right.

But only for a season. I find myself looking back on signs as coincidences, like a crestfallen lover looking back on his moments of passion while bitterly labeling them empty, even though they truly were earth shattering moments of life unrutting itself to smile at him. I know they weren't just coincidences. But that doesn't matter: I need a cure now, and if I had faith at the moment of thoughts like these, thoughts like these would be entirely superfluous. Faith provides its own inner proof. The heart has its reasons which the heart knows not, as Pascal scintillatingly said.

Signs dance with doubt because -- it has to be -- I am being pressed to my limit, because this is the crucial time that determines the outcome. Yet if I had a faith that pervaded every second of who I am, I wouldn't even need signs, would I? I need signs because I overvalue the finite, and this only because I'm not moving toward eternity. Once again I have to catch myself and backhand the flaccid fear that tags me: off to hell, world. What comes, comes, and I'm doing the only thing I can.

Leap before you look, child. It's all Maya anyways.