[MD] Boromir's Journey

[gav]

wow! brilliant post steve - important! - eerily synchronous too as i was on the phone minutes prior to reading the post, encouraging an emotional close friend to trust in herself and life and she replying that she doesn't have that belief - and i replying that it wasn't about belief.

faith is about trust - trust in oneself and the whole shebang. it is not about hope really - for hope implies a hope that things will turn out okay - faith accepts that even if things don't it is still for the best.

faith is something that seems to grow gently and quietly and then it flowers....and without knowing exactly when it all happened there is a  trust and acceptance of life- acceptance, letting go, surrender - these are all aspects of faith.

 faith needs careful attention, even when it has flowered...each act in our lives that comes from a trust in our selves - our centre; or from a similar trust in the honesty and love of another, will nurture faith.it is a pragmatic test: we learn that faith works.

we can trust ourselves. we don't need to be corrected. whatever we truly feel/want is right and good - this is what batailles' 'story of the eye' sorta gets at.

 the way is perfect and we only need to be in harmony with it. faith is authentic spirituality.

 undo 
(a bjork song - bjork names bataille's 'story of the eye' as the critical moment in her development as an artist)


--- On Tue, 22/9/09, Steve Peterson <peterson.steve at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Steve Peterson <peterson.steve at gmail.com>
Subject: [MD]  Boromir's Journey
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Cc: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
Received: Tuesday, 22 September, 2009, 4:54 AM

Hi All,

I was thinking about Boromir of Lord of the Rings. He was the great warrior from Gondor who betrayed the Fellowship and tried to steal the ring from Frodo causing Frodo to flea and continue the quest alone joined only by Sam.

Boromir's Journey was the failure of the Hero's Journey. Boromir answered the call but was not fully committed himself to the quest. The others were devoted to the quest regardless of the chances of success. Boromir did not lack any belief that the others had. There is no talk of belief in a higher authority where Boromir did not believe or did not believe as strongly as the others in that higher authority to set things right. When he argued that their task was impossible, none of the others could disagree. I don't think he had any different assessment of the probability of success for the Fellowship's task as any other members of the Fellowship, yet he was in great despair, and the others were not--at least not to the degree that Boromir was. I think the others had faith and that Boromir's lack of faith destroyed him and that his lack of faith was not a lack of belief. The difference was not the presence of absence of an intellectual structure but an
 attitude toward the world or trust in the process of life.

Though he is a fictional character, the self-destruction of Boromir rings true to me. There is something to faith that is not about belief but about something else that needs to be better articulated. It is something that is important to both believers and nonbelievers. I think the opposite of the sort of faith that Boromir's story is an allegory for is not disbelief but despair and that faith of this sort is not assenting to factual claims but letting go and being comfortable with not being in control of everything. It is possible to believe that God exists and that the Bible is true and still despair. So even religious beliefs do not exhaust faith. I think it is also saying "yes" to life. It is possible to not believe in a divine authority and still feel that the universe is unfolding exactly as it should be often in spite of the facts. It is an attitude tied up in beauty. It is the understanding that the world of our desires--the world that does not
 include illness, death, and conflict--is not as beautiful and perfect as the world as it actually is.

I don't think it is a stretch to say that the story of Boromir is a story about faith since Tolkien was a Christian and is viewed as a Christian writer, so faith is the sort of issue that we may expect him to address in his fiction.

What do you think? Is faith the same as factual belief as fundamentalists seem to be saying it is? Or is faith something that is independent of belief as in the case of Boromir? Can you help me articulate what it is?

If belief is a habit of action, as the pragmatists say, is all action best described as some belief? Is faith--the aspect of faith that does not concern factual belief--something that could benefit from a pragmatist's re-describing now that religion fails to speak to so many of us?

What does any of this have to do with the MOQ? I don't know, maybe you can tell me?

Could I be any more geeky than to philosophize about elves, dwarves, and hobbits? Probably not. Can you think of any parallels to Boromir's story in less nerdy culture?

Best,
Steve
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