I live beside a pine forest that stretches across thirty acres. The first time I stepped into it, I got lost. My sense of direction, usually sharp and reliable, failed me. As the sun dipped towards the horizon, I stumbled forward, hands outstretched, unsure of what I was grasping for. The ground beneath me shifted from firm earth to soft, uneven patches, thick with fallen needles. The air was dense with the scent of pine resin, and apart from the sound of my own breath, the forest held its silence.
Whenever I find myself lost in untamed places, I think of God, not out of a need for divine protection, but because faith, for me, often feels like being lost in such a place.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in Prayers of a Young Poet, offers this meditation:
My God is dark and like a clump of a hundred roots
drinking silently.
I lift myself from His warmth;
more than this I don’t know,
for all my branches rest in the depths
and only sway in the winds.
There is a quiet, earthbound quality to this faith. It’s not one that lifts you heavenwards with miraculous certainty. It’s one that presses you deeper into the soil, into the humus of being, into the vast unknowability of what is. It is not a faith of celestial light, but of roots and shadow, of growth unseen beneath the surface.
In the long and often tedious debate between atheism and belief, both sides lay claim to the rational high ground, volleying arguments as if logic alone could settle the matter. Yet, in their certainty, each risks a kind of blindness. The truth, if it can be called that, seems to lie elsewhere, beyond the rational and the irrational, in a realm that logic cannot fully grasp because it was never meant to. To have faith, at least as I understand it, is not to reject reason but to recognise its limits. It is to acknowledge that some truths arrive in whispers, in intuitions, in the quiet spaces where language falters and silence speaks.
As Lent reminds us, faith is not about certainty but about walking through wilderness. It’s about accepting the shadows, embracing the silence, trusting that even in moments of disorientation, something deeper is at work. It is a season that asks us to acknowledge the unmapped places within ourselves, to make peace with mystery, to persist in seeking even when the path ahead dissolves into darkness. Perhaps the lesson is not in finding our way but in learning to dwell in the unknown, to stand still beneath the trees and listen to ourselves, to the world, to whatever hums beneath the surface, waiting to be heard.
Consilium 