“All things are possible to him that believeth.” —Mark 9:23
“The questions of the meaning of living and the cosmos are just that, true questions, posed by . . . the linguistic, ‘moral, believing animal,’ who consciously and in reality encounters and raises them. These true questions inescapably entail dialogue with others and creative engagement with their experiences and with one’s existential experiences. This is the way in which meaning is made and is artful and poetic.” —Lori Branch, “Beauty and Belief”
We all believe in something, we have to believe in something, otherwise what keeps us going, really, at the end of the day, in the
twists and turns and ups and downs and heartbreaks and heart stops of day-to-day living; this is what I tell myself, what you tell yourself, what he or she and they and we all tell ourselves, whenever the clock stops, or the eyes close, or the screen turns black. What keeps us going? Well, the answer might be the blood chapel at the end of the drive, or the weeping Jesus when the baby’s heart stops, or the hope of a baby when none seem to grow, or a collection of hearts, or the flowers in the garden, or an eerie view of a mountain shelf, or a day of reckoning when the newspaper hits the front stoop, or a grandmother’s gift, or the chance of getting out, or the hope of a man, his arms spread over a gilded cross, the hope of Him.
What is belief? What do we—you and I and me and they—believe in?
That’s what this issue of Inscape’s about.
Mikayla Johnson