As I watch'd the ploughman ploughing, Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting, I saw there, too, O life and death, your analogies; (Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)
~ Walt Whitman, "As I Watche'd The Ploughman Ploughing,” in LEAVES OF GRASS
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Real faith is rooted in a basic unknowing about ultimate things, and religion helps us to be in relation to that mystery. This kind of unknowing can offer calm or create anxiety, depending on a person's faith. Often people fill in this emptiness by insisting that they possess the truth. The fragility of their faith is betrayed by their strident insistence on being right and by their efforts to force their views on others. They seem afraid of the very things that define religion: mystery and trust.