The cry of faith

Artist: Herbert William Weekes
Image from Wikimedia Commons

There's a great misunderstanding afloat in our times about the real meaning of the word "faith". Many people are convinced that faith involves struggling to believe something that they find hard to believe in the first place. Here's another approach, however:

The Hebrew word for faith in the Old Testament is emoonah. What makes that word interesting is that it’s the sound that a baby donkey makes when it is calling for its mother. To appreciate that, you have to say emoonah so it sounds like that.…I sometimes think to myself, if you say it soft, it’s almost like braying. The point being that faith in the Hebrew Bible is like a baby donkey calling out or crying for its mother. There’s something kind of wonderful about that. There is an element…I don’t know if you want to say of desperation in it or not, but there certainly is an element of confidence also that the cry will be heard.

- Marcus Borg

The above paragraph is from a longer essay on faith by Marcus Borg that you can find right here. I really recommend that you click through and read the whole thing. Very illuminating on the subject.