Hard pressed was I, in my young and feverish years,

To see faith as something more strenuously wrought,

Able to peer unblinking into the abyss of doubt,

Acutely conscious of its own fragility,

Yet somehow viable in a world of endless challenges.

I put no stock in ancient creeds or testaments,

Authenticity was in the moment, not the past,

You could be tested, and you might fail.

Faith was a ship in choppy seas.

So much worked against it.

Surely you could understand,

If the choice to believe was the last thing I would consider.

Scant part would I allow for myself in the belief process.

Would God exist because I believed it so?

An insult to the whole discussion!

I grasped at the so-called larger issues:

The truth question, the elusiveness of certainty,

The mirroring of doubt in faith and faith in doubt.

Yet precisely because the question

Cannot finally be settled,

I now see that I must take a stand.

The pretense of agnosticism is its alleged neutrality,

Its truth, the profundity of what we do not know.

But we are not absolved by that.

The question is too important to merely wonder and stand idle.

But if I then must choose,

It will not be by way of Pascal’s wager or Kierkegaard’s leap,

Though I fancy I have scaled the lonely heights,

And known the vertigo of doubt.

For me it will be a joining with that great company,

Whose witness I cannot ignore,

Which lays a claim on me and calls me home.

So when the shadows lengthen

Across the landscape of my soul,

And doubt draws near, I will seek the light.

I will recite the creeds, receive the sacraments,

Search again the scriptures, sing the hymns,

Hear the Word brought forth.

And in the end, if it does all come to naught,

And I am the one deceived,

It will have been a glorious deception.

Bud Hayes
Oak Park