When did you learn to believe?

I wrote about believing in Santa when we discussed who taught us to believe. I think he’s a helpful aid again as we discuss when we learned to believe. As I mentioned before, we did the whole Santa Claus thing in my house for many years. I think that I was in the third or fourth grade when I finally realized that it was all too good to be true, it must have been a hoax.

Children are incredible. Their minds soak up everything like a sponge. Because the world is new to them, they really will believe just about anything a trusted person tells them. We love fantasy and fairy tales in our house, but it’s really important to me to keep the distinction between reality and imagination. I highly value imagination and I love hearing my daughter make up stories and listening to her tell me all about her drawings and craft projects. Imagination and fairy tales give us a window into the deeper realities of life. They give us a glimpse of truth and meaning beyond what our eyes can see. That’s why I think it’s really important to distinguish between the dragons and what the dragons remind us of. That’s what fairy tales do: they tell us a made up story that helps us see or understand something that’s not made up at all. Fairy tales help us remember what it’s like to dream big and believe in things that aren’t tangible.

Not many of us adults in our post-belief, materialistic, digital world really believe in anything that we can’t see or touch, do we? We’re so busy and connected that we don’t really even see the everyday wonder in a flower or vegetable garden. We don’t take the time to watch the sun rise or set. We don’t observe the steam coming off of our coffee or tea. Heck, we’re too busy to wait for our coffee or tea to cool down- we just drink it iced to get the sugar and caffeine hit as quickly as possible.

Even in our culture, though, there are glimpses of the transcendent. When people gather together and march for something they believe in, it’s electric. When someone is hurting and suffers misfortune, total strangers donate money on crowdfunding websites. You can still travel to remote locations, look at the landscape, and wonder at the beauty and majesty of it all. Transcendence is still there, hiding in the shadows of the digital wasteland, waiting to remind us of the things we can’t see- we just have to look for it.

It used to be a lot easier to find. People used to read novels about fantastic worlds or even the regular world and experience something deeper than their present reality. We used to be so much closer to the earth and experience transcendence when we would watch plants grow and animals play. Poetry isn’t nearly as appreciated as it used to be and we miss out and undervalue the insight of our bards and prophets. We were made to think about and experience the world that we can’t taste, see, handle, hear, and smell. Children know this. That’s why they play make-believe.

But is it really “make” believe? Aren’t children reminding us of the importance of belief? Even if their belief is in something made up like Santa Claus, that skill, learning to believe, is critical. I think we all learn to believe and imagine when we are children. So, maybe we don’t need to spend our time thinking about when we learned to believe, but, rather, when we learned to stop believing.

I’m going to give it to you straight- I work on a college campus and I know how our culture feels about religion of all kinds. It’s fine if it’s pretty shallow and private. It’s fine if my practice of my beliefs doesn’t infringe upon your desire to do literally whatever the heck you want. (I’m not going to spend my time here telling you why that’s an absolutely silly and impossible idea, but it is.) We get awkward and uncomfortable as soon as someone we know starts to take their spiritual ideas seriously. Why? I’ll tell you what I think- it’s because we’ve forgotten how to believe.

We learned to believe in the fantastic and magical when we were children, but somewhere upon the road of our lives, we forgot what that was like. Or maybe we decided that belief was stupid because it always fails us and disappoints us because it’s a lie (this is why I hate Santa Claus and refuse to practice that tradition in my household). No one taught us that, though our favorite stories or fairy tales were made up, the things that they taught us or reminded us of were, in fact, quite real (you could try to tell me that you can do this with Santa here, but you’ll lose. I’ll tell you why some other time). Then, the culture got a hold of us and we would doubt anything that couldn’t be proven with the scientific method (I don’t hate the scientific method. I just don’t think it has any place in the spiritual realm). Vague, misty, spiritual ideas were thrown into a childhood bucket and disregarded as naive at best. We stopped watching the sunrise. We started drinking iced coffee. Belief died.

When did this, or something like it happen to you? It’s very likely that it wasn’t intentional and you may not have even noticed. But how much credence do you really give to spiritual or transcendent ideas and experiences? When did you decide fairy tales were stupid? When did you take your first steps down the road towards unbelief?

I think this matters, like everything else we’ve discussed, because if we can figure out when we stopped believing in things our senses couldn’t experience (or maybe it was people, institutions, life itself?), then we have a shot at figuring out why. And if we can figure out why we don’t believe in things anymore, then we can examine if that’s a position still worth taking.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates).