Faith

"In fact there is no way to 'return to the faith of your childhood,' not really, not unless you've just woken up from a decade-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you feel betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life - which means even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived - or have denied the reality of your life."

    --- My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman (emphasis added)

Life is not an error. And he would know - he wrote this book after a cancer diagnosis and a bone marrow transplant. If he says that life isn't an error I have to believe him.

A life of faith is a life of great change. This is reassuring, since my faith looks nothing like it did three years ago. 

I think I've found another author who speaks my language. Soon we'll be on a first name basis like me and Madeleine (L'Engle of course).