The struggle of Witnessing.

There's something about imminent departure form a place you've grown to call home, from the people you've learned to pass almost every day and you get comfort from just seeing pass you by and smile, from the sounds that make up the space around you, from the tastes that swirl through a culture, that gets you to start thinking about annoyingly meaningful or at least seemingly meaningful things.

I have started to think now, as I am ending JVI, why I did JVI in the first place, and what this here and now means for the there and then.

So I have decided to go through the 4 values that I wanted to support and live when I signed up for this excursion, just to see what would happen.

For those of you that lack familiarity with the components of JVI, they are :

Living Simply, Witnessing Faith, Community, and Social Justice.

Today's blog has been brought to us by the letter F... for Faith... and for Failure and for Footwash and Fungus, and Flakes, and Feathers, and Fuck, and Franklin, and Farts, and my all time favorite (that too) Fraternization.

Witnessing faith seemed like such a loaded set of words to me when I first looked into JVI. It sounds pretentious to me to some degree. Not only does it assume that I have faith, which is ok to assume, but it assumes that that faith is worth sharing, that my faith can somehow be exemplary of something.

When I thought about it in that context it totally turned me off, and not to anyone's surprise, it was probably the component I most treated like a salad bar choice I could leave under the uncomfortable lighting and glass casing.

Faith, to me, is in constant flux between incredible strength, pride, and passion, and a complete and utter nihilistic darkness that can consume me and sometimes incapacitate me in bouts of depression at the meaninglessness of the universe. Sometimes the universe seems perfect and balanced, with God at its center, or being it itself in its pantheistic glory. While at other times the cold tiny speck of dust in the bitter cold and black of space is much more real to me.

I have found powerful feelings and experiences in and through most of the world's religions in my travels and explorations of the world and of my place in it. Yet, I return to the language of Christianity because, despite my differences with the Church in practice and theology on many, some would even say deal breaking, occasions, I also find great comfort, motivation, and love inside of it.

So, faith to me in a journey, a struggle, and passionate search for the embrace of God through following a way of virtue and love... so basically be a nice guy and look for the meaning behind it. Love others and treat others as best you can. All of that in its simplicity is also a Huge struggle in and of itself.

I have faith, then.

But what bothers me is this witness part. Because to witness is to be one who has seen something, who has experienced something, who knows something and who can reveal the Truth of it to those who do not know. One who can prove something through their existence and word.

Think about witnesses in other contexts. In court a witness is the holder of a truth they experienced and who swears to tell the truth of that experience for the benefit and knowledge of others' struggle for truth.

A witness at a wedding or an event is someone who can testify to the truth of what they experienced.

To put that word with faith seems wrong to me. Sure I can witness through my words to the teachings of the Church, and I can witness to my passion or to my struggle with religion because I was there and I can explain my own thoughts and emotions, but can I or anyone else be a witness to FAITH?

Isn't faith, by definition, a leap over a gap in knowledge, a jump based hopefully on clear reasons to a conclusion that is UNPROVABLE, that is UNKNOWABLE.

How then can anyone testify to an experienced TRUTH, when the best they can do is recount a feeling, a thought, an emotion, an idea... a belief.

How can anyone be a light for someone else of some universal and divine TRUTH, when faith itself is the struggle to try and discover that truth?

And, even if that is all possible in people of great connections with the universe, the divine, God, Ultimate Reality, or whatever you wish to call it, who am I to think that I am that person? ME?

No that seems rather pretentious to me. If I were that person, I probably would be unable to admit it because of the amazing humility in my heart, or would simply live it and not think about it. But I am not someone who has any more of something to offer in terms of what is really going on than anyone else...

so unless we can all be constant witnesses to each other of divine truth (which arguably we can through LOVE) then I am far from being able to meet this component of JVI either in my time here OR in my life afterwards.

I can meet something close though, something a little reworded...

I have so far through my time in JVI witnessed my own personal struggle with my faith.

Here in Majuro, where the pressure from society seems to be believe or die, where most of the kids question their faith but shut it up for fear of others and of hell, who are told not to question, not to think, not to reason, and so have more or less dead or dying faiths (on a general scale)... saying that its OK to doubt, and showing then when you do you don't just give up but keep trying seems to be more of something that I can witness to. It also seems like something I can continue to witness to.

Where I am now, I see that there is one underlying thread that has kept my passionate moments of living Christian or religious faith intense and burning, and that has kept me more good than not when I fall into pits of despair... especially in the recent past. That thread is the idea that what is most important is to find, first, what motivates me each day to be a better person, to love more, to care more, to treat better, to show more kindness, to be more generous, to put others before myself no matter the cost, to sacrifice anything for the well being of others... finding that motivating power is the first step to a more profound faith. That is not to say that when you find it it will be sunshine and rainbows ever after, sometimes even that will falter in your head, but finding that first and realizing that you have found it for yourself, not for its imposition on others... is something I have come to truly take a leap of faith into, and a struggle with I can continue to show to the people around me.

Maybe that's not what JVI was looking for, but that's what I've found.