Faith Is the Doorway, Not the Destination

I think the concept of faith has been misunderstood.

Or maybe misused is the better word.

Faith is often presented as something you’re supposed to cling to for your entire life in the face of uncertainty and doubt. As if the highest spiritual virtue is continuing to believe in the absence of evidence. That framing has never sat well with me.

To me, faith is something much simpler and much more practical.

Faith is openness.

It’s an open mind. An openness to the possibility that reality is deeper than it appears. An openness to something greater than ourselves. An openness to God, however one understands that word.

In that sense, faith isn’t a belief so much as a posture.

And here’s the key point.

Faith is not meant to last forever.

Faith is what allows the process to begin.

Think about how many important things in life work this way. Trust comes before intimacy. Curiosity comes before learning. You don’t demand proof that a friendship will be meaningful before showing up for coffee. You show up first. The evidence comes later, through experience.

Spirituality follows a similar pattern.

If someone approaches the idea of God or transcendence with total closure, insisting on proof in advance, nothing ever gets off the ground. No relationship forms. No experiment is run. The very experiences that might count as evidence are never allowed to occur.

Faith, understood properly, is what makes those experiences possible.

Once that openness is genuine, and once it’s paired with honest seeking, something interesting tends to happen. People report changes. Patterns. Moments of guidance. Encounters that feel meaningful in a way that’s difficult to dismiss. Sometimes they call them miracles. Sometimes mystical experiences. Sometimes psychological transformation.

Call them what you want. What matters is how they function.

They become evidence.

Not universal, laboratory-grade proof. Not something you can hand to someone else and say, “Here, believe this.” But personal evidence, the same way love, trust, or purpose are known. You don’t believe in those things because someone argued you into them. You believe because you’ve lived them.

And once that happens, faith starts to fade into the background.

At that point, belief is no longer being propped up by openness alone. It’s supported by memory, experience, and interpretation. You’re standing on something you’ve encountered firsthand.

This is why I think it’s a mistake to treat faith as a permanent requirement. Doing so actually diminishes what the spiritual life is supposed to produce. If after decades of seeking, prayer, reflection, and engagement, you still describe your worldview as resting on faith alone, something has gone wrong. Either nothing has accumulated, or you’re not allowing yourself to acknowledge what has.

Faith did its job.

It opened the door.

After that, the relationship takes over.

This also helps explain why spiritual disagreements so often talk past each other. One person is asking for evidence from a distance. The other is speaking from participation. They’re not operating in the same epistemological space. One is waiting to be convinced. The other is describing what happened after they stepped in.

None of this implies moral superiority. It doesn’t mean skeptics are deficient or that believers are special. It simply means that some kinds of knowing require engagement. If you never step onto the path, you won’t see what’s down it.

There’s also a humility built into this model that I appreciate. Even when faith gives way to evidence, that evidence remains personal. It invites rather than compels. It doesn’t force belief on anyone else. It simply says, “This is what happened when I was open.”

So no, I don’t think faith is meant to be maintained forever.

Faith is the doorway.

Once you walk through it, you’re no longer relying on faith alone. You’re relying on lived experience. And at that point, the conversation changes, not because doubt disappears entirely, but because belief is no longer hypothetical.

It’s relational.

And that, to me, makes far more sense than blind belief ever could.