The Choice of Job
There is a point of least faith. This is the minimum amount of faith required to simply get by in the world. The word ‘faith’, here, is specifically left lowercase: faith in God, perhaps, but faith that the world will get better? Faith that the next breath will come, that you and the world in which you exist are compossible? However terrifying this large a concept may be, as True Name would have it:
But what does it mean to believe in something like [the irreversibility of time]? Or the sanctity of life or love or art? Or God, for that matter? ‘Belief’ as a word is a stand-in for a concept so broad as to be to be intimidating or impossible. One may say as Blake did, “For everything that lives is holy”, but encompassing that within one’s mind is truly terrifying. \parencite[122]{mitzvot}
All of those things in which we have faith, whether it’s, as True Name says above, the sanctity of life or love or art, or perhaps God, circle around the unknown. The are perhaps too hot to touch directly, so we define them apophatically. We circle around them along with these simple words — life, love, art, God — and hope that we can divine their shape by the shadow of our passage. We circle and circle and circle, and our wandering steps wear down the earth beneath our feet until that which we explore is left on higher land. The elevation of unknown things is a constant and collective process.
I’m Madison now. I’m no closer to defining what it means to be transgender. Were I pressed to describe what it feels like, I may have the words — it feels like an oscillation between dys- and euphoria as I move further away and closer to this sense of identity — but I don’t have the connection to those words that makes them feel real, feel true.
This point of least faith implies for some an ideal of least faith: that one should strive to live their life taking the least number of things on faith as possible, that to rely too much on faith becomes a fault. For others, it is a principle of least faith: it is an intrinsic property that we tend towards the least amount of faith required to live, as is evidenced by the ever-increasing understanding of the world around ourselves.
And, perhaps because of that principle, this point of least faith is always shifting, trending usually downwards — though some discoveries, if they are to be believed, may make that line tick upwards. Every day, we drift towards some point at which all things may be known.
Or, to speak in terms of cost and benefit, that point of least faith is the point of faith at its most disinterested. It is the point at which you may hold one singular thing on faith rather than all of those countless aspects that lie within that exchange, that power dynamic. That point where, against all the world throws at us, we are still able to hold to that which we believe to be true.
And that was mine. That was my point of least faith. That was the point at which I…’doubted’ is not quite the right word. That was the point at which I shouted at nothing, the point at which I demanded an advocate from no one. That was the point that God, the universe, that very same no one answered my note of interrogation with one of exclamation. Instead of some explicable approach to the problem of identity, it insisted that it is much stranger than I had ever thought.
That was my point of least faith, and that was my own choice of Job. That was the point at which I could have looked at the mess that had become my life and taken one of two paths.
The path of Jonah lay behind me. That was the path of fear, of running away from such an overwhelming unimaginability, whether or not storm-tossed ships and all of God’s biggest fish lay before me. That’s the path of falling back into Matthew, of being so angry I could die.
The path of Qohelet lay before me. That was the path of disinterested faith, of pushing through all that shit that the world had thrown at me. That was the path of looking back to see folly and looking ahead to find that, yes, “wisdom surpasses folly as light surpasses darkness.” (Qohelet 2:13, Alter) That was accepting my birth as Madison on the grounds of that faith that I was being true to myself. Sure, I may yet hate life, might hate what choice I’d made, might hate all things under the sun because the wise, too, dies like a fool.
But I would have at least done it.
I was young, once, and dumb. I can hardly say I’m any smarter, now, but at least I’m Madison. At least I’m not that angsty, angry asshole who thought to himself he needed to come to terms with being a terrible person.