Tag Archives: Faith And Doubt

What We Know. What We Believe.

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“Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

—Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Bengali poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate.

“Dead? She died?”

“Yesterday.”

“Well, she suffered a lot. Now maybe she’s with her mother and father and relatives.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“I don’t really know. I don’t think we’ll recognize people the way we do here, now. But I don’t know.”

“I believe she understands the mysteries … of life and death. She knows all.”

The conversation was getting too heavy, so we drifted to other topics.

Somehow, though, it struck a nerve. How can you not know what you believe about death, especially as you get closer and closer to that unknown journey.

Afterward, I started thinking about how we come to know what we know. What we believe.

After all, we know some things with certainty. Right?

Some because the results never vary. Two plus two always equals four. The distance between two fixed points remains the same no matter when we measure it. Water boils at a predictable temperature. Gravity pulls downward. Cause produces effect with reassuring regularity.

These certainties are grounded in repeatable outcomes. Test them once or a thousand times—the answer holds. They do not depend on belief, mood, or memory. The world behaves, and we trust it to keep behaving.

Then there are the certainties born of lived experience. Morning follows night. Habits steady us. The familiar route gets us home. What worked yesterday will probably work again today. These truths may not be written as formulas, but repetition grants them authority. Experience becomes evidence. Pattern becomes trust.

Together, these forms of knowing shape our confidence in the world. Whether derived from calculation or habit, they rest on the same foundation: consistency. When outcomes repeat, doubt quiets. We stop testing. We accept and move on.

Other things we know but with less certainty.

The weather forecast offers likelihoods, not guarantees. A medication helps one person and fails another. A conversation unfolds as expected or veers off course for reasons we cannot quite name. We plant the same seeds in the same soil, and one season flourishes while the next disappoints.

Here, knowledge comes through probability rather than proof. We notice tendencies, not laws. We have seen enough to believe, but not enough to relax. Patterns appear, then break. This kind of knowing asks something different of us. Not trust, but attentiveness. Not certainty, but judgment. We proceed carefully, aware that what often happens is not the same as what must happen.

Now comes the third kind of knowing: knowing what we believe.

This one does not submit to proof or probability. It rises instead from lived moments that resist explanation. Experiences that arrive uninvited and linger long after analysis ends. The sense that someone who has died is still, somehow, present. The calm that sometimes settles in a room at the moment of death, unmistakable and unearned. The feeling that something matters even when nothing practical is at stake.

These are not conclusions we reach. They are recognitions we undergo.

Here, certainty takes a different form. Not the certainty of answers, but the certainty of encounter. We may disagree about what these moments mean, but we rarely deny that they occur. They are woven into our lives—in hospitals and bedrooms, at gravesides and kitchen tables, in silences that feel fuller than speech.

This is where death stands apart.

Death is neither a hypothesis nor a forecast or a probability curve. It is the one certainty that admits no exception, the one experience every one of us, without fail, will face. Whatever else we debate, revise, or relinquish, this much is fixed.

What matters is that we cannot face death—our own or another’s—without believing something. Belief, in this sense, is not doctrine. It is orientation. It is how we stand in the presence of loss, how we love without guarantees, how we make sense of endings that refuse to be tidy.

I have always lived in awe of what has come my way. I have bowed, again and again, to the belief that life is good and meaningful and mysterious. I see no reason to abandon that posture now. I am confident that death will be a continuation of that vision—for me.

Shaped by faith traditions throughout the world, by experience, and by nearly eighty years of living, I can say what I believe.

I may be wrong. Others will stand elsewhere, with different convictions or none at all. But belief, for me, is not certainty. It is the posture I choose in the presence of mystery.

I believe that death is not an ending but an unveiling, a beginning—a stepping into shared sacredness.

I believe that I will understand fully, see clearly, and grasp truth without distortion.

I believe that I will know others as completely as I have been known.

I believe that all confusion will clear and all mysteries resolve.

I believe that the questions of life and death, justice and suffering, will be answered.

I believe that I will be gathered into a collective consciousness—united with all who have gone before and present with all who have yet to go.

I believe that every life is known clearly, held equally, and belongs fully.

I believe that love stands unveiled—clear, complete, and free from all that once obscured it.

I believe that fear has no place in death, because the journey continues as it always has—guided by goodness, shaped by beauty, and sustained by love.

I believe that I will go on.

More to This

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“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
—Walt Whitman

Lying on my leather sofa. Scrolling through Facebook reels. My mind is quiet. My heart is unguarded. And then—there he is.

Standing alone on the rocks, guitar slung low, sunset pouring behind him like a benediction. Waves slam against stone, but he’s steady. Rooted. A white t-shirt clings to his chest, a pendant rests just above the place where prayer begins. He looks like someone who’s known both ache and awe but hasn’t run from either.

He strums. And sings.

“I’ve been thinking about dying…”

It grabs me. Grabs me deep. Not the lyric alone—but the way he sings it. Calm. Certain. Like someone who knows not only the shoreline but also the undertow.

I listen to the end. I sit still in its wake.

Later, I call my oldest sister. Ninety. Sharp. Aware. Lucid in a way that startles sometimes. I tell her about it. I play it for her.

Silence.

Then softly, she says, “Play it again.”

I do.

And there it is. The line that undoes me.

“My daughter says we live again…”

A child’s faith. A father’s voice. A goodbye that sounds like a hello in disguise.

She doesn’t ask what it means. She doesn’t need to. Some truths live in the body, not the brain. And some goodbyes don’t speak in past tense.

That’s what struck me about the song—about him—this barefoot man with a guitar and the Atlantic licking at his heels. He wasn’t mourning. He was offering. Not an elegy, but a threshold.

Suddenly I began to wonder—not just about dying, but about the shape of leaving itself.
How often the final word is really the first line of something else.

What I hadn’t yet named—what was already working on me under the music—was the song’s quiet insistence.

Over and over, Mark Scibilia returns to the same plea, almost like a whispered vow:

“Don’t you dare
tell me that there ain’t more to this.“

It isn’t argument. It isn’t doctrine. It’s defiance. He’s not trying to prove an afterlife. He’s refusing a small one.

The line keeps coming back like a tide, not to persuade us but to steady us—reminding us that our lives don’t fit neatly inside a closing. What we give our lives to has a way of exceeding the frame.

When he sings it, it sounds less like belief and more like fidelity: a promise to those he loves,
a promise to the life they’ve shared, a promise that whatever waits beyond this moment must somehow be wide enough to hold them all.

That refrain—there’s more to this—isn’t a conclusion. It’s a refusal to conclude.

What moved me wasn’t simply the lyric, or even the tenderness of a daughter’s faith carried in a father’s voice. It was the way the song refused to close in on itself. More to This doesn’t resolve so much as it opens outward. It leaves space. It resists the neatness of an ending.

I noticed my own response before I noticed the pattern in the song. I didn’t want the ending sealed too tightly. I didn’t want it explained away. I wanted to lean forward, not back.

Once I noticed that, I couldn’t unsee it.

I began thinking about how often endings—especially those that arrive at the moment of death—behave this way. Not declaring an end. Not insisting on finality. But gesturing instead. Toward light. Toward motion. Toward wonder. Toward something unfinished and unnamed.

Literature has long understood how difficult it is to stop speaking.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sends Sydney Carton to his death with a sentence that looks forward rather than back. “It is a far, far better thing that I do…” The line does not tell us what follows. It simply insists that meaning survives the moment.

Fitzgerald closes The Great Gatsby not on death itself, but on motion. “So we beat on, boats against the current…” The sentence ends. The movement does not. Time presses forward, indifferent but alive.

In Beloved, Morrison refuses to let memory die with the body. “This is not a story to pass on,” she writes—an ending that sounds like a warning and a summons at once.

And in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the novel concludes not with extinction, but with a completed gesture. Something is finished, yes—but not everything ends.

Different writers. Different centuries. Different convictions.

Yet we witness the same reluctance to close the door too firmly.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan does not receive a doctrine. He does not glimpse a mapped-afterlife. What he receives instead is recognition—a sudden clarity that loosens fear’s grip. Terror gives way not because he knows what comes next, but because something essential falls into place before the end.

Death happens. But it does not cancel significance.

Tolstoy never argues that life continues. He simply writes as if meaning does.

What struck me, once I saw it, was how consistent this posture is. Literary endings at the edge rarely snap shut. They soften. They widen. They behave as if language itself resists abrupt closure.

Then I began noticing the same thing outside of books.

Real life, it turns out, leans too.

Emily Dickinson’s last words—“I must go in, the fog is rising”—do not explain themselves. No reassurance. No declaration of belief. Just movement. Go in. Not away. Not gone. Into something obscured, indistinct, impossible to chart.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have asked for “More light.” Not an answer. A desire.

Steve Jobs, famously unsentimental about metaphysics, reportedly died repeating: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” Awe without explanation. Wonder without commentary.

Claude Monet is said to have murmured simply, “It’s beautiful.”

Different lives. Different beliefs. Different temperaments.

Yet, at the edge, language leans in the same direction—not toward negation, but toward attention. Toward light. Toward something still being apprehended.

What interests me isn’t whether these people believed in an afterlife. Some did. Some didn’t. That’s not the point.

The point is posture.

Faced with an ending, we pause. We soften our language. We gesture rather than conclude. We speak as if relation has not been severed—only altered.

That notion brings me back to the song. To Mark Scibilia standing barefoot on the rocks, Atlantic licking at his heels, singing not a goodbye but a threshold.

Long after it ends, the song keeps playing—not audibly, but somewhere just beneath thought. What lingers isn’t melody so much as stance. The way it opens outward. The way it refuses to settle. The way it leaves me listening.

Perhaps that is the common denominator. Not belief. Not certainty. But attention.

We don’t close the door too fast.

We lean forward instead.

Even after the final note fades, something in us remains listening—
sure, somehow, that there is more to this.

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Remembering
Patrick Allen Duff
March 17, 1960 – January 28, 2021

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