"I was just in the neighborhood . . . " II: On sandhill cranes and the nature of faith

Not even a hundred yards south of our new residence, there's a drainage ditch; its function is to collect run-off from the Kansas Turnpike and siphon it off to the creek that lies to the west of our little neighborhood. During the time we've been here, there's been some water in it, but to Scruffy's and my hasty eye, it doesn't exactly look like it's the environment for a thriving biological web.

It's not been there every morning we've walked by, but there's a sandhill crane there often enough for me to have termed it a "regular." He stands on the edge of whatever water there happens to be in the ditch, waiting for . . . well, whatever it is that cranes wait for.

I had assumed that it was waiting for fish--cranes resemble herons, after all; these, at least, like to be near water, so I assumed that they eat fish, too. To all appearances, though, the only swimming things this ditch would be likely to host would be mosquito larvae and various water-borne microbes just itching to wreak havoc with someone's gastrointestinal system. So, here I am thinking, "Well: here is something like a metaphor for faith, no? The maintaining of hopefulness even in the empirical face of hopelessness."

Then I did some reading, and I was reminded yet again of the pitfalls of assumption.

Sandhills are actually omnivores, eating insects, small reptiles, invertebrates, and the seeds and shoots of plants, all of which are found in wetlands . . . and along drainage ditches, of course. Indeed, fish don't even appear in the "Diet" section of the International Crane Foundation's entry on sandhills. This particular sandhill, then, is no dolt.

All this has gotten me to thinking a little about the definition of faith found in Hebrews 11:1. The letter's immediate audience is Jews recently converted to Christianity who are reconsidering their decision, so it's also quite effective at reminding those skeptical of the whole notion of belief that the foundations of faith don't rest on the immediately-observable. The faithful "see" things the rest of us don't, and in the unlikeliest places.

There's nothing especially profound here, I realize. But I think that in the recent debates between believers of all sorts and some of the so-called "new atheists" (and, often, among believers themselves), there's a denigrating or a forgetting or a refusal to acknowledge from the get-go some pretty basic truths about the nature of faith. Some believers have a tendency to forget that faith isn't empirically based and that there's no shame at all in that fact; skeptics take that very fact, though, and bludgeon believers with it without being willing to entertain discussions about how empirically-based disciplines deal with questions of the unknown. But all the while, that sandhill watches, and waits, and trusts, and then will move on to another place to watch, and wait, and trust. Like a scientist, in his way. Like a believer, in his way.