Yesterday afternoon, coming back from the Cubs game on the El, I saw a huge sign mounted on the roof of a church. He went deeper than the merely respectable, so that he could get to us and bring us home. Author Fenton Johnson, writing about various monastic communities in the United States, both Christian and non-Christian, distinguishes between belief and faith. Belief has to do with doctrines and practices. It is often the prelude to faith.
Faith is something else.
He quotes Alan Watts, who over forty years ago was the Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern. Its antonym is fear. Without faith, without that willingness to embrace life, including its uncertainty and pain and mortality and mystery, the soul become stagnant - possibly the only aspect of the universe that can resist change, and in so doing possibly the only aspect of the universe that can really die. Faith, as Fenton Johnson describes it in his article, has everything to do with how we live in the present and how we face the future. Confident, not in our own cleverness and ability, but confident in God's grace.