Last week I wrote about that well-known phrase, "leap of faith." It's like walking above a chasm on a bridge the far side of which is shrouded in fog, I wrote. It's like taking a step up even when you can't see the entire staircase you've begun to ascend. It's like stepping into cold water, trusting that it's really dry land.
Yet for all that, I think I wasn't really looking at a true "leap of faith." For sure what I was describing was an act of courage and faith. It might even be indescribably hard to take that step, especially when you really can't see through the fog to the other side ... when you can't even really be sure that there is another side. I don't want to disparage this in the least. A real leap of faith, though, requires something that's missing from these metaphors.
In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade there's a scene in which Indiana finds himself in a cave at the edge of a huge cliff. He as to get to the other side, but there just isn't any way to get there. He can't go back and take a different path to see if he can avoid the drop altogether. There's no bridge to cross, with the far side shrouded in fog or not. He is well and truly trapped.
Yet he's been following the clues in an old journal. It hasn't let him down so far, and the book says that there's a bridge there. Apparently finding his way across is the last of the three challenges that most be overcome if one is to find the Holy Grail (which is what Indiana is looking for). The clue for this challenge says, "Only in the leap from the lion's head will he prove his worth." So our intrepid hero takes a deep breath and steps out into the empty air.
It's a great scene, and a great metaphor -- a true example of a real leap of faith. He steps off the solid ground, the safe, the known, and into the quite possibly deadly unknown. What happens next is what makes it such a great image: as he steps off into the void, a bridge appears.
And that's the promise made by every religious tradition we humans have ever developed: if you trust the universe -- God, the Spirit of Life, the Great Unknown, the Mother of All -- your trust will be met in kind.
Now, to be honest, it may not work out in the way you'd planned or hoped. It may not even seem to work out at all. In the prayer by Thomas Mertion I quoted last week, the Trappist monk said,
"I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death."That's what makes it a true leap of faith. Unlike with the fog enshrouded bridge, or the staircase that rises out of view, in a true leap of faith you don't know that there'll be anything to catch you, yet you go forward anyway.
This is not, however, an invitation to foolhardiness. It's not about testing the universe, but, rather, trusting it. There is a difference, and discerning that difference is something that a spiritual director could help you to do.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
