Steven LaChance Blog

Faith. It’s a word that’s followed me like a shadow, shifting shape depending on the light I cast on it. For years, I’ve turned it over in my mind, trying to grasp its edges, only to find it slipping through my fingers like smoke. Merriam-Webster offers definitions—”strong conviction,” “complete trust,” “belief in God,” “firm belief without proof”—but these feel like fragments of a mosaic, incomplete without the grout of lived experience. Faith, at its core, is an act of believing. Simple, right? And yet, the moment we try to pin it down, it flutters away, revealing contradictions that leave me both fascinated and uneasy.

Take the phrase, “My faith is Catholicism.” It’s a declaration that seems to swallow whole libraries of theology, centuries of tradition, and the messy, beautiful humanity of millions into a single word. But does anyone truly believe everything a faith tradition espouses? Or is it more like adopting a lens, a way of seeing the world, while quietly wrestling with its imperfections? I think of Saint Augustine, who wrote, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” But what happens when what we “see” through faith clashes with the tangible world—or with someone else’s vision?

Then there’s the more nebulous claim: “My faith is in God.” Which God? The God of Abraham, the Brahman of Hinduism, the universe itself humming with quantum possibility? I’m reminded of a Sufi parable where a group of men touch different parts of an elephant in the dark, each swearing they know its true form. The one grasping the trunk cries, “It’s a serpent!” The one holding the leg insists, “No, it’s a tree!” Faith, in this light, feels like a finger pointing at the moon—not the moon itself. But too often, we conflate the finger with the celestial body, then demand others worship our hand.

And here’s where faith curdles. When someone hisses, “My faith tells me you’ll burn in hell,” it’s hard not to recoil. How did a concept rooted in trust and mystery become a cudgel for condemnation? The Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, modern-day bigotry draped in scripture—faith weaponized is faith stripped of its essence. As the poet Rumi warned, “The essence of faith is fewness of words and abundance of deeds.” Yet so often, deeds of love take a backseat to dogma. Even the act of swearing oaths on Bibles or Qurans feels paradoxical. Does pressing a palm to leather-bound pages really inoculate us against lies? Or is it theater, a performance of morality that risks reducing faith to a prop? In secular courts, people swear on constitutions, or simply their own honor. Truth, it seems, doesn’t require a holy book—just a holy intention.

This is why faith, for me, has become an interior landscape. No mountaintop proclamations, no pamphlets shoved into strangers’ hands. Imagine knocking on doors to announce, “I believe in gravity!” or “I find sunsets meaningful!” It’d be absurd. Yet we treat spiritual convictions differently, as if they require an audience. Einstein once mused, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” My faith lives in that mystery—a quiet knowing that there’s a vast, humming moreness to existence, something that stitches atoms into galaxies and hearts into symphonies. It doesn’t need a name, or a ritual, or a badge. It’s the pause between breaths, the warmth of a shared glance, the unshakable sense that love and stardust are cousins.

But here’s the rub: If faith is this personal, this fluid, how do we navigate a world where others wield theirs like swords? Maybe the answer lies in holding our beliefs like fireflies—cupped gently in hands, marveling at their glow, but never trapping others in jars to prove our light is brighter. After all, as the Tao Te Ching whispers, “The way that can be named is not the eternal way.” Perhaps true faith is learning to walk the unnamed path—and letting others wander theirs, too.