On the Nature and Purpose of “Faith”

This reflection was written by a former student, Karl Paulnack. He participated in CPE Cohort #2 and now serves as a part-time Chaplain at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, NY.

“When a baby is born, no matter how many monitors and medical personnel in the room, everyone is waiting for one event, usually an audible event, often a musical event (pitch and rhythm for meaning-making.) We are waiting for the baby to cry, from which we deduce the baby has taken the first breath. Regardless of medical monitors, your life essentially begins when you take your first breath.

On the other end, again, despite a plethora of medically sophisticated techniques like brain-wave monitors, deep pain stimuli and other markers, your life essentially ends with your last breath. Life begins when you inhale for the first time and ends when you exhale for the last. That’s not a medically sophisticated definition of life, but it is a spiritually accurate one.

Now, in between, something fascinating happens. The average person exhales 600 million times. 600 million times, you breathe out, let go of all of your oxygen, and you assume—you trust—that there is going to be a next breath. I bet you that you’ve gone through your entire day today not thinking once “I’m letting this breath go—I sure hope there’s going to be another one….”.

We are so confident there’s going to be another breath that we even fall asleep, trusting that the cycle will go on forever. We treat it like a fact; we act as though it is a fact. There will always be another breath after this one, millions and millions of them.

It is of course not a fact; the reverse is true. The assumption that there will always be another breath is utterly false; I see last breaths all the time. I can swear to you they happen. One of the things I do in the ICU is help people with the shock that sets in when they realize that grandma did, in fact, have a time when she exhaled and there was no breath to follow.

This belief that there will always be a next breath, this assumption, is false, irrational, untrue, but we live our entire lives as though it WERE true.

Here's the thing: if you constantly worried about whether this exhale was your last—or the one after that—or the one after that—you would be functionally incapacitated. You would be unable to cook dinner for your kids, unable to do your job, unable to exercise, unable to sleep. Factually true or not, if you were not able to “suspend disbelief” and act as though each breath would trigger another, you would experience something ranging from a significant anxiety disorder to serious psychosis.

The breath teaches us that while life with faith is irrational, life without it is insanity.

This is the role of faith in spiritual practice. Faith is postural, not factual. It is a way of positioning ourselves into the headwinds of life, not a scientific proof of some sort. We live as though there’s always going to be another breath because it is insane not to. The assumption is required for functional, practical living. The assumption is not true; the last breath comes, sometimes with shock, sometimes with surprise, but the assumption serves us well nonetheless. Faith is practical posture, not cognition, more like yoga than science.

Here's the other interesting thing about those 600 million breaths. We like inhaling more than we like exhaling . We really like gain and success and praise and increasing value, and we really hate loss and failure and blame.. We like adding lines to the resume and hate break-ups. We love gaining muscle at the gym and hate cancer. We love when people think we are brilliant or perceptive and hate when someone finds us “meh”.
We love the inhale and hate the exhale. We love gain, and we hate loss.

Dear one, look at the breath. Life is 50 percent loss. (pause). Your life is 50 percent loss. You spend 50 percent of your time letting go of things, giving things up, losing them.  It’s 50 percent exhale. It’s 50 percent things not working out, 50 percent letting go of the stale stuff that you can no longer use, 50 percent releasing things that are no longer nourishing you, that will, in fact, poison you if you hold on much longer (for God’s sake, exhale!). It is 50 percent “blow it out.”

We don’t like that, do we! I love the honors and awards line on my resume, every single line, and I hate the breakups, the people who scoff at me, the jobs I interviewed for but didn’t get, on and on.
Life is 50 percent things falling apart, and 50 percent things coming together. It is 50 percent grief and 50 percent new experiences. At least this is what the breath suggests. And while in my 20’s I would have wanted to tell you that life was 80 percent success and 20 percent loss, by my 50’s I would have told you that it was closer to 50/50, and in my 60’s, I would tell you there is no such thing as success and loss—they are the same thing. They are the two faces of the same coin. The things that fall apart make way for the things that come together. When you exhale, you make room for the next inhale. When you inhale, you will experience loss within 10 seconds or so.

When you bound up one of the gorges here, huffing and puffing, tell me: is it the inhale that moves you forward, or the exhale? Isn’t it clear if we study the breath?

Is it our current system falling down that you think will hinder us and the system yet to be built that will move us forward? Can you see that the breath is the breath, and that the illusion that “inhaling is better than exhaling” is misguided? We let go of what doesn’t work to let in what does. We blow out what is stale and toxic to take in what is fresh. And: it’s 50/50. We do both equally, automatically, unconsciously. It is the way the world is.

Faith is a postural assumption that says “there will be a next breath.” It is not factually true—but it is insane to live any other way. It is insane living as though there will never be another inhale. Such a person dies before they are dead, wanders in a zombie life waiting for death as a relief.

Life with faith is irrational, imaginary, and untrue. Life without faith is insane.”