The following poem by David Whyte portrays faith in a more meaningful fashion than what I’ve been familiar with most of my life.  In this poem, faith is presented with a “loss” dimension, poetically conveying the need of “losing one’s faith to find one’s faith” (my paraphrasing). This is related to the observation by evangelical-Christian literary, “hall-of-famer,” Oswald Chambers who noted the danger of “believing only in our belief.”  Whyte and Chambers, and many other spiritually-oriented persons, see the danger of an ideological faith, understanding that the ideological dimension of faith must lose its tyranny in order for the underlying dimension of human experience that faith points to can be experienced.  This is precisely the wisdom conveyed in the famous Buddhist teaching, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  Whyte captures this truth with the image of the moon fading away and offering, “the last curving and impossible sliver of light before the final darkness.”

Poem by David Whyte: “Faith”

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

T.S. Eliot also understood this subtle dimension of faith, noting in The Four Quartets:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning 
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled 
If at all. Either you had no purpose 
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured 
And is altered in fulfilment.