This song means a lot to me because it expresses with more frankness the way I (and many others) feel about faith and belief than is typically expressed in more pious, droll ‘religious’ songs — or equally pious and droll religious interpretations of ‘secular’ songs.

For me, listening to “Faithless” helps in making dispossession a spiritual exercise. It helps me live in a relationship of “releasement” to faith and belief, because I have learned that what I and many others once took to be the essential building blocks of religious/spiritual life will not, cannot, carry us as far as we think they will.

Faith and belief themselves, and all the ways that humans have invented to curate faith and belief, cannot be “the answers.”  But being able, with this song, to say “I don’t have faith in faith, I don’t believe in belief,” can be the portal to something else. Beyond the too-small habitation formerly known as “salvation,” there lies a “yes” to more life left to seek out.

Sculpting this “yes” comes from being able, as the song says, to “quietly resist” the endless incitements to exchange the radical character of hope and love for less worthy places to land. In the last several years, I have learned to take what we often think of as religious ground-floors as, instead, trapdoors — through which we may fall. Into — falling, and a way of falling. “That’s faith enough for me.”

Tommy Beaudoin

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