Yesterday’s Whisper

I understand that searing desire to speak and to be heard. I have it too. As much as all of me yearns for proof and dismisses outright your beliefs for facts, there are times when I long for your faith. Things seem easier for you, somehow, and yet I know that faith in the unseen cannot be easy. Most of me thinks that you are wrong even as I envy your ability to converse, to ask, to praise, to plead.

In moments of utter loneliness I also reach out to the darkness, only to hear nothing; nothing but my own voice echoes back at me. So I sit here on my perennial fence, looking at you, but refusing to step forward to join you because I think that at the end of the day you are only talking to yourself, asking – yourself, praising – yourself, pleading with – yourself.

There is much in the world that science is yet unable to explain and yet faith is unable to explain it as well; nothing can explain some things and you ask too much of me. You ask me to believe and I cannot believe in something I cannot touch, cannot see, cannot hear, cannot feel.

I watch your conversations as you kneel, rise, sway, mutter, moan, sing, and I envy your belonging, for I belong nowhere, and with no-one. I feel as fragile as you feel, but my fragility is different from yours. Yours resides in your faith and in your community, but mine resides in me alone.

To me your conversations are all yesterday’s whispers, and they are lost in the wind, and gone forever, just as mine are. But while mine went unheard, I envy your belief that somebody heard yours.

3 Comments

  • stace8383 28th August 2013 at 5:05 am

    Sometimes life seems so easy and nice for the faithful… sometimes it seems enviable to place blame and responsibility elsewhere… but in the end, reality wins! Think of it as character building.

    Reply
  • Louise Broadbent 4th September 2013 at 2:28 am

    But I think there are genuine advantages to faith. There is a power in belief. If you believe you can do something you are more likely to succeed. Self-belief can only go so far, though, but with belief in an all-powerful being, you can achieve more. You can cure ‘incurable’ diseases. Personally, I find it more amazing knowing that a human being is capable of that, but would they be if they didn’t have faith?

    There is the down side, though. The not helping yourself because you believe God will fix things for you. God will find a way and everything will be all right so I don’t have to find a solution. That’s the problem.

    That and telling everybody else they’re wrong.

    Reply
    • Awanthi @ I Speak Awanthi 8th September 2013 at 11:34 am

      I agree with you, Louise. I find that aspect of faith amazing as well, but what I find most amazing is the defence of – and the belief in – someone who does not exist – and have never shown themselves to exist. I am fascinated by what makes us want so desperately to believe that this is the truth and the only truth.

      I presume that telling everybody else they are wrong is related to that innate human need to feel superior to everyone else – or at least to those that people think are making the wrong decisions/following the wrong path/behaving and living in the wrong way.

      As if, in the first place, there was a right way…

      Reply

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