Faith is both the dreaming and the crying

There will always be some who say that such faith is only a dream, and God knows there is none who can say it more devastatingly than we sometimes say it to ourselves, but if so, I think of it as like the dream that Caliban dreamed […]

“Be not affeard, the Isle is full of noyes,
Sounds, and sweet aires, that give delight and hurt not;
Sometimes a thousand twangling Instruments
Will hum about mine eares; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and the in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and shew riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d
I cried to dream again.”

[…] Faith is like the dream in which the clouds open to show such riches ready to drop upon us that when we wake into the reality of nothing ore than common sense, we cry to dream again because dreaming seems truer than the waking does to the fullness of reality not as we have seen it, to be sure, but as by faith we trust it to be without seeing. Faith is both the dreaming and the crying. Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all. Faith in something – if only in the proposition that life is better than death – is what makes our journeys through time bearable. When faith ends, the journey ends – ends either in a death like my Father’s (suicide) or in the living death of those who believe themselves to be without hope.

Frederick Buechner