[MD] Boromir's Journey

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt, John, Gav, all,

Yes, Matt, I am still trying to retain the good aspect of  the calm
acceptance in faith. I agree with you that most of what we are left
with once we drop belief from faith can be retained as hope. However,
I think there is still another important aspect of faith (stripped of
belief) that is not captured by hope alone .

You object that the faith I described can not be reconciled with being
engaged in trying to improve the world, that one who has this faith
becomes complicit in the ills of the world by calling the world good
as it is. You also say that it still sounds too much like certainty in
things that we are in no position to claim certainty about. One way to
look at faith is as a recognition of the contingency of our beliefs
about what is good and bad and an acceptance of our lack of certainty.
What we think is good fortune can turn out to be a disaster and vice
versa. Who can tell how events will unfold and whether we will be
better or worse off in the long run?  Faith is then a letting go. It
is saying "yes" to life without knowing what the future will bring. It
is wanting to be completely present to both the good and the bad
because who knows which will turn out to be which in the long run? One
can have hope that the future will be better and still have the
courage to face the future no matter what it is like. In fact faith,
as described by Paul Tillich  as "the courage to be," can even be seen
as a prerequisite for hope and the courage to work for a better
future.

As an illustration of faith as a lack of certainty, consider the
following old zen story as told in Alan Watts' book "Tao: The
Watercourse Way."  (I heard it most recently in the movie "Charlie
Wilson's War." )

The Farmer's Horse

"There is a story of a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the
neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad
luck. He said, "May be."

The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses,
and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune. He said, "May
be."

And then, the following day, his son tried to saddle and ride one of
the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. Again the neighbors
came to offer their sympathy for the misfortune. He said, "May be."

The day after that, conscription officers came to the village to seize
young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer's son
was rejected. When the neighbors came to say how fortunately
everything had turned out, he said, "May be."

The yin-yang view of the world is serenely cyclic. Fortune and
misfortune, life and death, whether on small scale or vast, come and
go everlastingly without beginning or end, and the whole system is
protected from monotony by the fact that, in just the same way,
remembering alternates with forgetting. This is the Good of
good-and-bad. "

Alan Watts
Tao: The Watercourse Way
Pantheon Books, New York, 1973


Best,
Steve








On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> Steve said:
> Can't hope also get tied up with the idea of certainty as
> being certain that things will get better?  Or more modestly
> being certain that things really can get better?
>
> Matt:
> With the former question, I'm sure hope can, but I'm
> probably just gerrymandering the terms so that certainty
> always falls on the faith side and contingency falls on the
> hope.  So, hope-tied-up-with-certainty is, ipso facto, faith,
> but if only because that's how I had set things up to fall.
> Isolating certainty as a fulcrum was probably one thing,
> certainly in hindsight, I was trying to do.
>
> Now, with the latter question, "being certain that things
> really can get better," that doesn't seem to be something
> we need necessarily be certain of, so much as a
> precondition for hope.  If improvement weren't an actual
> open possibility, there doesn't seem much utility in notion
> of being hopeful for betterness.  E.g., it seems a
> precondition for the MoQ, though not necessarily is it a
> precondition that things _will_ get better, given it is only
> in hindsight, as Pirsig says, that we can tell the different
> between DQ and degeneracy.
>
> Steve said:
> Getting good at recognizing the good and finding
> nourishment in what is good can strengthen us to change
> what is bad while focussing only on the bad leaves us
> with helpless and useless dispair. Can we then retain a
> notion of the importance of being okay to some extent
> with things as they are as actually helpful in our projects
> to make things better?
>
> Matt:
> I shy from "okay" as a somewhat elliptical shade of
> complicity, but you're reaching for that "calm" you talked
> about before.  I think the calm is the right kind of
> observable behavior to desire, but I'm not sure either
> what the best description of what to call it's origins, what
> the best description of what's going on inside is.  I don't
> think faith, but neither does hope seem to be sufficient.
> Perhaps necessary, but not sufficient by itself.
>
> Matt
>
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