Been thinking a lot about this question this morning, as all Tar Heels have after the prime-time shellacking our social-climbing football team and its famous head coach received last night.
I have been a Tar Heel for twenty-five years. We moved to Chapel Hill in 2000 for me to do the doctorate, and have stayed. All our children are born and raised here; the piedmont for the first ten years, and the mountains for the last fifteen.
We thought hard about coming here! Leaving Palo Alto and another Stanford degree seemed like foolishness from some POVs. But North Carolina beckoned. It was a “deep purple state” even then, before we used the term–with blue ascendant, especially in the Triangle. It was a better fit for our whole lives. We committed, and have (almost) never regretted the choice.
Believing is not just repping your team when they win! Anyone can do that. That’s why you can get a Carolina shirt at Hot Topic when men’s basketball is on a streak. And why casual fans howl for a head when the new guy delivers an 8-20 season.
No: believing is standing with your school when they lose.
And not just on the scoreboard. When the institution you attached yourself to on purpose loses its way–or better, when the whole enterprise breaks and your school trips on its laces trying to get onto the court. When the system you threw your lot in with twenty-five years ago betrays their values in almost every way they can be betrayed.
We all need something to believe in. As Wendell Berry taught me, our institutions ARE us.
And belief is irrational by definition: if it were rational, it wouldn’t be faith. Bruce Springsteen said that–he didn’t sing it the night we heard him in Kenan Stadium, but he got it. And he put it as the last song in the most no-reason-to-believe record he ever made, too.
Faith is stupid…and it is the only thing that matters. Finding it when you can’t find it is the only work worth doing.
Seeking a reason to believe today, in so many ways.
Chris Osmond PhD 
2 responses to “What is a Reason to Believe?”
Hi Chris, Your essay today is so on point and resonates on levels near and far for me today! Yes, the near is all that we continuously find we are surrounded with. I am not sure how many lunch times or coffee we would need to get through to understand what is happening.
But I am writing because of something else.
I went to Ukraine and worked with potters this summer at a museum with some amazing people. I spend time in bomb shelters when ballistic missiles llew overheard and i listened to nearby explosions from repeated drones and those rockets. I relied on the people around me with their apps on their phones to warn me when to take cover. Stubbornly and irrationally, I did not want to have that app on my phone. Everyone lives with the app as it is a life line informing what is about to happen near them or in some other distant area from them. I relied on others to know what to do. I was amazed at the level of attention given to go for cover. So I listened, learned and took shelter as well. Outside of those moments and hours, I and everyone around me went on with life as normal. Perhaps that was the most unusual part of it all! Along with everyone around me, we lived two realities: in the night and early mornings people hid far underground, while the dark forces ruled above ground sowing random explosions and one just waited to see if “it was your turn this time to be hit directly” The next morning everyone is out getting their coffee, going to work and assessing who died, how many injured and how much damage was inflicted. When you spoke or listened, each breath felt like the person was saying “I am alive for one more day!” With each new day- each person makes every minute count! Seeing a neighbor, a friend,
Several millions have left, but there are many who stay and face what I described everyday. I am referring to those in their homes. There are also the soldiers on the front lines. There is a keen understanding that it is because those soldiers are holding the front lines, which enables them “to live one more day” This is their home. This is where their ancestors, grandparents, parents grew up. This is where they have lived all their lives. They are civilians. They are a peaceful people. ( in fact it was Moscow and the old Soviet order who “pacified” repeatedly from the early 1930s with the genocide through famine, then deportations, mass deportaions.) So the choice is clear- “taking my chances with the nightly bombing, or give in to the renewal of the above mentioned horrors their parents went through in the 20th C ( My mother survived the famine when she was 10 and described it through her child’s memories.)
My own 21st century experience is that I have lost 15 members of family on my Mother’s side in the occupied territories. The last time I spoke with my cousin was Auguat 2014 on the telephone. I asked why are you not leaving and he answered ” looters were roaming the streets, entering apartments and looting. The agreed up “green corridor” which was announced as a way for people to leave was regularly bombed and people were dying along the entire passageway. The Massacre of Illovansk is now remembered as a sad tragic date on the calendar each year among many others in the last 11 years of war. How does a quiet developing society in the 21 century find themselves trapped by the on-coming missiles, rockets and on coming drones by an enemy who wants “clear all the cities and villages of all its living population” ( See what is left of Mariupol.)
Believe! I witnessed how people in Ukraine continue to believe that they will survive. They believe in humanity. I believe in humanity. If we do not believe in humanity, what is there to believe?
I don’t have an answer to the question why I went to a country with a war going on. I just knew I had to go. I needed to be with the people who continuously face danger while someone they do not know and far away decide whether they live or die.
Irrational? Stupid? Perhaps. Believing!
Thank you for your words Chris. I hope all is going well for you.
Natalia
Natalia, I am so honored you chose to share this experience on my blog–it is so far removed from the daily of my life, of college football and American politics as (depressingly) usual. You have been so on my mind as the war has waged on, and your beautiful Ukranian-style pots and mugs that we still have in our home and on our mantel reminds me daily that you are suffering as your homeland is trampled (again). Thank you for your message of faith here–I miss you, and hope hope hope for an end to it.