Consider the following comments on faith.
Faith is not certainty, it is the willingness to act before the certainty arrives.
We keep faith in people for the same reason we keep faith in mornings, because the alternative is unbearable.
There is a faith that closes the mind and a faith that lets you keep walking in the dark.
Faith is taking the first step even without seeing the whole staircase.
Martin Luther King Jr
Losing a faith can feel less like learning the truth and more like losing a home.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that faith is not only a religious word but a daily one, the trust we extend to people, to the future and to ourselves without any proof that it is warranted. Open with a personal instance, perhaps a faith kept through doubt, or a faith in someone that was either vindicated or betrayed. Then explore the tension between faith as courage, the willingness to commit before the evidence is in, and faith as evasion, a refusal to look at what we would rather not know. A useful structural move contrasts the faith we are given, inherited and rarely chosen, against the faith we arrive at or lose on our own, which costs more and means more. Caution: resist both the dismissal that faith is merely wishful thinking and the piety that treats all doubt as failure, since the most honest reflection holds belief and uncertainty in the same hand.