I’m one those annoying people who likes to ask strangers questions that I would never answer myself. If approached with anything more than the most superficial inquiry, I’ll avoid and evade and say something dumb like, “Hey, asking questions is my job!”
But on the 7th day of my recent 12-day, 200-mile Camino de Santiago, a passing pilgrim asked me a somewhat intimate question, and much to my surprise, I answered.
***
I was walking down an incline through a shaded fern forest, just about to reach a clearing, when a curly-haired man in his thirties started to pass me on the trail. “Buen camino,” he said, as is the custom on the Way of St. James. “Buen camino, peregrino,” I responded as we started to chat. He was a drug addiction counselor in eastern Germany. Born in Kazakhstan to a Russian father and a Kazakh mother, he migrated to Germany at a young age and seemed to now live between many worlds and worldviews.
“Why are you walking the Camino?” he asked me point blank in fluent English. “To deepen my faith,” I responded. “In what?” he asked. I paused, then answered that faith doesn’t need an object, direct or indirect. He asked me to explain what having faith meant then and tried to find the right word in German so he’d understand better. It wasn’t glauben, which is “to believe.” Perhaps it was best translated as vertrauen, which is “to trust.” Used as a noun, Vertrauen also means confidence, which seems to get closer to what I was looking for.
***.
Simone Weil called prayer “absolutely unmixed attention.” Czeslaw Milosz described it as an aerial bridge that he would continue walking over even if there were no other side to reach. Prayer is a mental act that helps one look forward in an unpredictable world. Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann says that prayer focuses the mind on hope, thereby externalizing it, something, I guess, like planting a flag on the moon. The mere act can calm the mind and soothe one’s fears. To have faith, then, is to insist, against all evidence, that the world is a safe and good place. It is, essentially, to trust.
Luhrmann calls this affirmative orientation toward life and the world a “faith frame,” a way of seeing the world as more coherent and benevolent than one’s experiences may otherwise suggest. Because sustaining such a view of the world is not easy, stories, rituals, and certain behaviors can help keep us focused. The trappings of religion, she suggests, are tools that help people “superimpose their faith frame upon an everyday frame.”
***
I’m happy I answered the mysterious Kazakh’s question, because our brief exchange helped me clarify what religion means to me. I’ve never understood why so many Americans seem to think religion is primarily a system of ethics or morality or even a set of beliefs. While these can certainly be aspects of religious practice, they are by no means its essence. If anything, they can be tools to help lead one to faith, which, again, is ultimately what religion is about.
To deepen my faith means committing myself more to the activities—like setting off on a medieval pilgrimage– rituals and stories that help me trust in the world.
And where does the supernatural come in? Well, I suppose that one only comes to terms with life—in all its joy and sadness—when one begins to ponder what lies beyond this life. But that is a conversation for another day.
