Trust And Crisis

Trust is a peculiar thing. It's simultaneous the source of strength and greatest test to a relationship of any sort. It is not unique in it's simultaneous necessity and deceptively limited stature. Trust can be like a punctured innertube; one needs it to survive the ocean, and yet even at it's fullest capacity, it will run out before it's purpose is complete. Simply put, we cannot trust enough, and are far to untrustworthy for our own good.

Trust is the best/only/worst metaphor for our encounter of the sublime. Descartes rightly began with self-referential existentialism because nothing else is trustworthy enough to conclude in the absolute. And as we break through modernism into a liminal post-modernity, in many ways it is the end of trust as an absolute. Many things were once stylized as institutions, pillars of solid rock that could weather any storm of doubt. Sadly, these pillars are now mere sand and salt in the desert of the real.

Trust, ironically, is the answer the modernisms fact-anomaly. Relativism and perspective are no long ideologies to be fought against; this is no longer a culture war. If it is a culture war, both sides are untenably defenseless. It is rather, an amorphous culture habitat, and domination must be replaced by adaptation and synchronization. All that remains in the face of uncertainty is the banner of trust.

Both in faith and love, this holds up. As a younger man, somewhat disturbed by the divorce epidemic, I feared marriage; I asked a mentor of mine once, "How can you trust someone enough to marry them?" And the answer was not what I expected, and confirmed my fears. "You can't," he said. "All you can do is choose to trust, knowing that the person you marry will break your heart, and you will break yours. They will break your trust, and then you will need to forgive them, and restore that trust."

In faith, we trust in the sublime, and believe that as surely as we will break God's trust, his covenant love, He will be gracious, and forgive us. This is a scary hope have. Especially when you think about how hard it is to forgive someone that you love. Grace is hard for us, in either direction is must flow. I think that this experience, and meditation on the death and resurrection of Christ reveals a disturbing element of faith. While God's ways and God's grace are higher/greater/unfathomable than our sense of it, there is a shadow from His light in our earthly dwelling. Grace is a bloody, deathly, and altogether ghastly affair, even for the God of the Universe. God is wounded by us. God is disappointed in us. And his Grace is ridiculous in not only it's vastness, but the sum total of pain that God is willing to endure on our account, let alone on our behalf.

And the only possible response to all this is Awe. God is far greater than anything there could ever be. Images and senses and ideas are so plentyful and yet so impotent to reveal the vastness of what greatness truly is the essence of a God who forgives. Awe, shock, and aspiration. This is my starting point today. Perhaps that is what trust was intended to encompass.