Faith!

I have faith, I have faith in god, faith in my guardian angel, who brought me here, and who remains here with me. I can’t explain what she’s like, but I know she is near. I will not dash my foot against a stone.
I understand the difference between danger and fear. I feel a protective presence. I need to believe in this presence. I don’t know how to explain it, but it exists. And it will stay with me all night, because I don’t know how to find my way out of here alone.
(When Brida was a child, she would sometimes wake up in the middle of night, feeling terrified. Her father would carry her to the window and show her the town where they lived. He would talk to her about the nightwatchmen, about the milkman who would already be out delivering the milk, about the baker making their daily break. Her father was trying to drive out the monsters with which she’d filled the night and replace them with the people who kept watch over the darkness. “The night is just a part of the day” he would say.)
The night is just a part of the day. Therefore I could feel as safe in the dark as i did in the light. It was the dark that had made me invoke that protective presence. I must trust it. And that trust was called faith. No one could ever understand faith, but faith was what I’m experiencing now, an inexplicable immersion in blackest night. It only existed because I believed in it. Miracles couldn’t be explained either, but they existed for those who believed in them.
I learned about the dark night, I said to the now silent forest. I learned that the search for god is a dark night, that faith is a dark night. And that’s hardly a surprise really, because for us each day is a dark night. None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, and yet still we go forwards. Because we trust. Because we have faith. Or who knows, perhaps because we just don’t see the mystery contained in the next second. Not that it mattered. What mattered was knowing that I have understood. That every moment in life is a act of faith.