Sarah Benion

You’re Morally Obligated to Do Remarkable Things. Why? Well, partly because life is so difficult and challenging that unless you give it everything you have, the chances are very high that it will embitter you. And then you'll be a force for darkness. That’s not good. Also, the fact that life is short and can be brutal can terrify you into hiding. But you can flip that on its head and understand that since you're all in, you might as well take the adventurous risks. That's a very good thing to understand. What is also useful to understand is that there isn't anything more adventurous than the truth. This is something that took me a long time to figure out. You can craft your words to get what you want. if you're attempting to say what you believe to be true and attempting to act in the manner that you think is most appropriate, that's genuinely you. If you're trying to live in the truth, you have the force of reality behind you, and that seems like a good deal. You have the reality and the adventure. So, why is that a moral obligation? Well, if you hide and you don't let what's inside of you out—and you don't bring into the world what you could bring—you become cynical and bitter. Not only will you not add to the world what you could add, but you'll start being jealous of people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them. That's the pathway to hell.

Kierkegaard talks about the idea of being a knight of faith. He puts forward a proposition that I think is akin to the idea that undergirds marriage, which is: You cannot find out whether creation is Good or Evil without being all in on your bet. Just like you cannot be married without saying, “I am shackling myself to you and I am not going to run away no matter what. So we better get to know each other and get along because this is how it is going to be.” Without that, you cannot be deeply committed enough to the marriage to make it work. So, it seems to me, that at the forefront of faith, you have to act in the world with courageous trust—not naïve trust, but courageous trust—in the potential goodness of being to discover whether or not that faith is justified. Romance requires trust—and the deeper the trust, the deeper the possibility for romance. And that is partly why it is faith; you have to put the cart before the horse.