Hope Is Wanting, Hope Is Desire

Seeds do the same thing.  Watching seed heads develop is like watching babies being born and you know how I don't believe that birth is a miracle...(I believe it's a miracle that people keep giving birth, and that they don't rip completely in half while doing it)... I don't believe in miracles.  This is a natural process.  It's fascinating to watch this carrot flower develop into a new shape every couple of days and at some point I'm going to be able to shake a bunch of seeds from it and make more of the same carrots.  Not a miracle- this is nature.  I can see it happening every step of the way.  Just like we can now see the beginning of human life develop in the uterus using special equipment.

Faith is a dirty word to me.  I think it's fairly hideous.  It implies a willingness to believe a thing with no evidence to support its truth.  It requires willful ignorance.  I realize how many people will find this wrong and possibly offensive.  Particularly people who have it, for whom this is a huge part of their spiritual beliefs. 

I find it interesting that in the bible Jesus apparently used to perform "miracles" for people almost like a party trick.  There he was proving his magic by turning one loaf and one fish into enough to feed many, and turned water into wine, which makes it seem to me that he wasn't asking people in his own time to "have faith" but was actually showing them what the power of god could do through him.  That whole walking on water trick was pretty neat, I'd like to see that with my own eyes.  Yet here we are today and Jesus is long since dead and in the intervening 2000 years, people are expected to simply believe in a fairly tale (that's what Max calls it) without seeing any of this with their own eyes.  There is no proof or evidence even that the events in the bible are real*. 

Faith.  I don't have faith in things.  I either know them, or I don't know them.  What good would scientists be if they didn't have to provide evidence and make strong cases for their hypothesis?  We expect them to work very hard to prove their findings, to put their findings in a context that supports their theories.  I think it's wondrous strange that people who fervently believe a bunch of stuff that was written 2000 years ago without any proofs, and who value this idea that they simply have "faith" in a power that can put two of every animal on earth on a little boat, that these faithful people are so suspicious of science**, which requires so much proof.  Scientists are constantly having to revise their theories and their conclusions based on new information and it's part of the process of uncovering the answers in nature.  They make mistakes sometimes (because they're human, after all) but largely what science provides is an evolving understanding of the earth and how it works and its history and its secrets. 

Religions don't evolve much.  Which is further reason for me to distrust them.  Times change.  The earth has changed a lot since Jesus was nailed to the cross.  Why is it then, that there are no new chapters written for the bible?  Why does this God people believe in not give new verse, give new thoughts, new direction for "faith"?  When all the world is evolving around you, when the earth is undulating and flattening cities with her shaking and shifting, and new bones are rising to the surface, and old animal species are dying off and new ones are emerging- evolution seems so obvious.  It doesn't require you to have faith to believe it.  You can see the evidence in resurrected bones, in fossils of one celled creatures, in current mutating animals, in close DNA relationships.

And in some ways, I expect more from people with faith.  Because I have heard so many faithful servants of god talk about all of his creations...it surprises me that they would question the remains of animals that their god must have created.  Or is the devil credited with having created a lot of our earth as well?  Which really means that God isn't all powerful.  Which makes his packaging seem a little more lame.

I didn't really mean to go off on a religious tangent particularly.  What I really wanted to express was that in dealing with my life, with my mental illness, and riding the inevitable swings, and the knowledge that there is no cure for it, I've heard people mention having "faith" that all will be well.  Sometimes it's meant in a non-religious way, where a person is simply asking me to believe that good days will come again.  But there have been people who use that word who are religious and I know that some aspect of their use of the word faith has a base in believing that God will provide.

There is no cause for me to have faith in anything. 

What I do have is hope.  And sometimes my hope gets thin.  Sometimes it's a little threadbare and inadequate.  It needs rekindling.  I cherish hope the way some people cherish faith.  Hoping for something isn't expecting anything.  Hoping for something isn't believing in a thing.  Hope is desire.  Hope is wanting.  Hope is envisioning change even though you know it most likely won't come to pass.  Hope is what keeps hungry people alive through lean times.  Their ability to imagine a time when grains will fill the silos again keeps them hanging on.

There is no cure for mental illness.  It's a disease (or a disorder, really) of the physical body.  Of the nervous system particularly, and the brain and how they function together.  It isn't a spiritual shortcoming.  A person can fervently pray to God their whole life, believe in his power and wisdom and forgiveness, go to church twice every week and remain mentally ill their entire lives because being mentally ill isn't a question of will power or of simply "changing your perspective" or "thinking positively" or "reaching out for God's mercy", it is a problem with your corporeal body.  How many people who have lost a leg and begged God to give it back to them have grown a new leg?

None.  But science and mankind have fashioned artificial legs for those who have lost them.  Not God, science.  Industry.  Man looking for answers using what he finds here on earth.

Science is the only thing that has the potential to unlock the answers about the brain and the nervous system and give me, and the millions of others like me,  relief.  Still, science will likely never cure mental illness.  It has provided increasingly more effective medications for it.  And I have benefited hugely from these scientific advances in medicine. 

All the feelings I have recently expressed are real.  All of them come from my experiences and what life I'm living right now.  However, my mental illness amplifies everything I feel to an unbearable degree.  When properly medicated, the bull horn is removed from my emotions and they become less urgent, less huge, less impossible.  Feelings of wanting to hurt myself have been life long.  They become much less frequent, sometimes go away for long periods of time when my medications are working well.  When the medications are simulating the chemicals my brain needs in order to function well, in doses that are appropriate for the degree of my distress, I become almost normal.  Almost.  I certainly become more comfortable in my own skin.  I want to rip it open a lot less.  It isn't because the drugs are making me "happy" as some people like to imagine them doing (as though they were fun pills that make you go "weeeeee"), they are simply simulating what normal people's brains do. 

It is difficult to arrive at effective dosages.  It is something that constantly has to be adjusted.  Because we still don't know enough, we can't see the messages being sent between the brain and the nervous system in order to pinpoint where exactly it's going wrong.  So it's a try-and-see experience.  You know when you get to a good dose because you start concentrating on living your life, you sleep a little better, you react more rationally to stimuli, you don't want to kill yourself when you make a fool of yourself.  You don't get all giddy happy or dead inside (unless your dose or meds are all wrong for you!).

This isn't a question for faith.  There is no call for faith when it comes to my mental illness.  I will have it my whole life.  Like some heart conditions, there is no cure, there is simply management.  I have been the way I am at least since I was 13 years old which was the first time I bit myself until I bled.  Which until this moment I don't believe I've ever shared.  That's 26 years of being seriously mentally ill.  Of those 26 years, it has only been the last 8 of them that I have found any relief at all.  That relief was through official diagnosis, therapy, and medication. 

I can tell my meds aren't working well.  I can't even begin to afford an official diagnosis (It's been 8 years since the last one and I believe it would be wise to get a new one) so my only option is to go straight to the psychiatrist and hope that one can work with me effectively without a fresher diagnosis.  I need my medication to be working.

So this post is about hope, rather than faith.  I hope I can get my medications adjusted by the end of the summer.  I hope I can find better discipline in myself to manage my own mental illness.  I hope that I spend a little more time sitting with my plants because they remind me that life has no miracles, only quiet steady processes between being born and dying and I have my place in that.  I feel more hope when I see my plants growing.  Even though I didn't water them for two days in the 90 degree heat.

When I go out and plant seeds, I have no faith that they will grow.  I hope they will.  But I know that so much depends on whether I give them enough water, whether the soil is warm enough or cool enough, what kind of nutrients are present, and how old they are.  These are the requirements of nature.  When all its needs are met, a seed will sprout, and if it survives insect attack, it will mature into whatever its DNA packed case tells it it's supposed to become.

Hope is what I hang onto.




*I mean the events such as Jesus rising from the grave, and the whole desert wandering episode, those things for which there is no corroborating evidence.

**I realize that not all people of faith are suspicious of science but having met a rather large number of Christians in my life who are suspicious, I feel comfortable saying that many people of faith ARE.