The Leap of Faith: Freedom & Responsibility on the Journey Toward that Self Which One Truly Is

Recently one of my second-grade daughters—I have twins—had a tough day at school. My wife had baked peanut butter chocolate chip cookies a couple of nights before, and my daughter, who gets to make her own lunch or have "hot lunch" in the cafeteria, had opted for "hot lunch" and took a cookie along to go with it. As she waited in the cafeteria line, she discovered she had left the cookie in her desk in the classroom. Noticing she seemed upset, her teacher came over and asked her what was wrong and graciously offered to allow her to eat the cookie after lunch back in the classroom by sitting at the back table during number corner after lunch. So far, so good.

She felt better, until they got back to classroom. It turns out, it was my daughter's day to teach number corner to the rest of the class. The teacher told her she could choose to eat the cookie and be the teacher tomorrow or teach today but save the cookie for later. She didn't like either option. And, in retrospect, she seems to have been so jolted by the decision that she didn't initially understand she could ultimately have both the cookie and the opportunity to teach. She thought, at least for a few moments, that her decision was purely either/or. Nonetheless, her options really were an either/or—either have the cookie now and teach later, or teach now and have the cookie later.

She wanted the teacher to have the class do something else while she ate and then teach the number corner lesson later. The teacher explained to her that he wasn't able to adjust their entire schedule just so she could eat a cookie. She then got mad and kept changing her mind about what to do. She loudly would cry about whatever decision she announced saying she'd just throw the cookie away, then saying she would save it for later and teach, then saying her mom and dad would be mad if she didn't eat it, etc.

I won't share more of how my daughter's story played out, but I will share that the teacher—and I will add, among the very best of second-grade teachers, to be sure—described my daughter's behavior that afternoon as "a spectacular meltdown."

Anxiety in Life

The 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard described our freedom to choose in life a dizzying anxiety; more precisely, he called anxiety "the dizziness of freedom."

In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Kierkegaard reflected—

"Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down."

Life is full of decisions and, thus, anxiety. A few hours ago, I heard Oprah challenge that we can choose to become happier with our bodies by making better choices about what we eat. Freedom of choice, or freedom of the will, potentially means that a person is free to choose for themselves whom they will be. That possibility has implications for the notion of "authenticity." If a person can choose this path or that, this way of being or that, wouldn't either path or either way of being be "authentic" once they chose it? On the other hand, surely we have biophysiological predisposition; isn't it possible that, therefore, we have some innate potential, some predetermined and thereby limited options for path and way of being? How does "authenticity" fare in that predicament?

A friend of mine has faced the grand decision of whether to remain in his job and his town where his family has become rooted after nearly a decade or to pursue an offer for a new, exciting opportunity elsewhere, an offer of greater responsibility and influence, as well as a higher salary. Yet choosing the new opportunity would be choosing to leave another exceptional situation. His wife and children each, in their own ways, are well-rooted, happy, with needs met. My friend is intrigued by the new opportunity. What if it is the place where his deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet? Or what if the grass is browner on the other side, and he merely loses what he has?

In a conversation thread on social media, a poet named Manford bemoaned,

"God made the world...so He never wonders, while we are wracked with angst about whether to go for the more expensive appetizer. It makes Lyle Lovett's re-considered demand for a '*cheese*burger' kinda courageous."

He went on, challenging, "Humanly speaking, we can be wallflowers and wonder whether God hates us personally, or we can try to learn to dance...instead of fearing and trembling." Manford, defining Kierkegaard as "lamenting" runs the risk of missing Kierkegaard's overriding and ultimate optimism. Manford insinuated we should simply and courageously do "instead of fear and trembling." I disagreed, for as Kierkegaard instructed, the dizziness of freedom—that is, fear and trembling—is inescapable.

Another social media commenter named Tom contended,

"I've never run into a situation where the multiplicity of options resulted in anything frustrating, anxiety producing, angst filled or tragic for me. I enjoy and look forward to choices."

That's optimistic, but it misses the meaning. Kierkegaard's analogy for "anxiety" was the ancient Jew, Abraham, being told by God to give his son Isaac's life as a sacrifice. Kierkegaard described anxiety as a particular experience universal to all human beings which is marked by a dissonance between the requirements on us of this world versus the requirements on us of God. He called this universal anxiety, angst.

Angst is not merely worry (anxious thought) or restlessness (anxious action). Paul, the apostle of Jesus, for instance, cautioned the church in Philippi to "not be anxious about anything" but to "present [their] requests to God," while also reminding that those who follow God's lead by faith are "to work out [their] salvation with fear and trembling."

When Jesus urged his followers to care less for fleeting cares and temporal needs in their day-to-day lives and to look to his Father in heaven, he was confronting lives of restless self-reliance and worry that we all easily become trapped into ourselves. Yes, even before electronic devices and modern lifestyles, human beings flittered about.

While traveling, Jesus was briefly hosted at the home of a woman named Martha. Martha's sister, Mary, sat at Jesus's feet listening well to every word he spoke, while Martha, on the other hand, busied herself with a number of preparations for her guest. At one point, Martha complained to Jesus that Mary was leaving her to do all the work, and Jesus famously retorted, "You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed, only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:38-42, New International Version).

One prominent Christian theologian has stated, "Anxiety is rooted in a a failure to trust in all God's promises for you in Jesus." I disagree with this blanket assertion and linear causality. I believe that some of what I have already stated suffices to explain why. In short, I certainly do not believe that all anxiety is rooted in a failure to trust God. A good friend whom I respect and admire a great deal has sharply criticized me for this, accusing me of supplanting faith with the "psychological." Modern man has cast the spiritual and the psychological as mutually exclusive. Here we run into a significant and damaging false dichotomy. To be clear, it is not my intention to replace faith in God with something "psychological" for dealing with the anxiety of life at its root. Rather, I question the assertion that a lack of faith necessarily is its root.

Through both physical and social heredity, we inherit predispositions, limitations, and inflictions, including all manner of sickness and suffering. This gets at that notion of an "original" sin, a sin having its origins beyond ourselves and infecting the world itself, sin that we may not have chosen but that has marked us nonetheless. This sin, though it may have many differing manifestations in people's lives, is universal. And, of course, sin is also volitional; that is, we—and let none of us be excluded—also commit sin.

As Christians, we believe Jesus was "without stain or blemish." Surely we mean that he lived a blameless life, not that he was in a privileged position to be unaffected by the broken world he dwelled within. Indeed, ancient prophecy foretold that that incarnate Jesus would be a man of many sorrows, acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). Of course, we know he was not only that but that the broken world which grieved him also crushed him. I worship a God not whom I believe is insulated from sin but who dwelled intimately with sin and overcame it by a power that only he commands.

Kierkegaard's four stages on life's way

Kierkegaard (1845) described life as a journey involving stages of choosing how to live our lives, stages which are progressive but not necessarily linear, as we travel in the best of cases further and further toward that self which we were created to be.

Kierkegaard's first stage, "aestheticism," is of self-delusion, in which a person has no measuring stick for setting limits on their own behavior and seeks only pleasure but lives no passion, as true passion is necessary girdered by self-control.

Kierkegaard referred to the second stage as "the ethical," wherein a person is marked by some manner of conformism, driven by a responsibility that is below awareness—responsible but not discerning—a one-dimensional ethic marked by survival instinct.

Kierkegaard's third stage on life's journey was cast as a kind of increasing awareness in which one's self is the subject of an "inward deepening" Kierkegaard called "Religiousness A"—whether one of increasing spiritual or of psychological awareness, Kierkegaard saw here an unnecessary distinction. Ultimately, we experience the rise of passion out of the burning coals of the ethical, and a rise of a truer self. Yet awareness has its limits. We are, of course, both finite and sinful.

Kierkegaard (1844) contemplated,

"Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become...."

Kierkegaard's final stage toward becoming that self one was created to be is marked by a "paradoxical religiousness"—"Religiousness B," he called it—in which God, rather than our own deepening understanding, becomes "the Criterion." Beyond self-control, we ever face the impulse to widen our jurisdiction beyond ourselves; at some point, we choose that impulse or choose an entirely different mode of being, one that does not need a resolution of the dizzying anxiety of life's freedom, not because anxiety does not remain but in acknowledgement that it is not ours to control. Simply, we accept a grace that we cannot ourselves offer from a source we barely understand.

That latter acknowledgement itself is a choice and one, again as others, replete with anxiety. Whereas the leap of faith into Kierkegaardian authenticity does not free us from "fear and trembling," neither do the aesthetic or ethical modes. They do offer relief from anxieties in life, often significant relief, but they do not provide space for answers to larger questions about our existence, and they leave a person who has half-an-ounce of awe and wonder about life with a void that no pleasure or discipline will cure.

Kierkegaard sought to understand the path to freedom from despair, not freedom from anxiety. Life is anxiety. It is freedom, yet it is responsibility, a series of choices under constraint, one negating another. The question is not how to be free from wobbling feet on the dance floor. This operates from a false notion of courage—that is, freedom from fear rather than acting in spite of it.

The nub is how to bridge the chasm between what we know and what we need. Kierkegaard posed that nothing will do but to take a leap of faith, an invisible bridge from self to Other, in spite of and even propelled by unresolved tension and rising anxiety, taking a risk that, once taken, leads to an unexpected path, a healing that reaches beyond ourselves, and a greater wholeness—not some namby-pamby experience of wholeness; true wholeness. One found in ourselves, yet rooted beyond.

Again, Kierkegaard—

"Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go."

After starting a movie one night and falling asleep, I stirred at the witching hour as Indiana Jones emerged from between a narrow rock fissure to gaze at the edge of a deep gorge across a wide chasm to an opening in the rock face leading, presumably, to the Holy Grail. “Impossible. Nobody can jump this!” he mumbled to himself just seconds before closing his eyes in resignation, desperate to surpass what would be the third and final challenge in order to reach the cavern where the Grail was protected in order now to save his father’s life. "Only in the leap from the lion's head will he prove his worth." Indy placed one hand over his heart, took a deep breath, lifted one foot, and fell forward. A previously invisible bridge caught his step and led him to the other side.

Blake Griffin Edwards is a licensed marriage and family therapist and clinical fellow in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. His writing has been featured at GoodTherapy.org and PsychCentral.com as well as in Family Therapy Magazine, Context, and Voices Journal.

References

Kierkegaard, S. (1845). Stages on life's way. Translation by Howard V. Hong, 1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kierkegaard, S. (1844). The concept of anxiety: A simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin. Translation by Reidar Thomte, 1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.