A while back I picked up The Concept of Dread by Soren Kierkegaard. I would like to share a bit taken from the final chapter. It is entitled: "Dread as a Saving Experience by Means of Faith."

To catch you up to pace with Kierkegaard's thinking, dread is not a result of an objective thing out there in the world. Rather, "man himself produces dread." "Dread," he says, "is the possibility of freedom." Dread and possibility go hand and hand. In relation to dread, however, there is "the smiling." This is faith, the "infinite" possibility beyond the rationally explicable.

Encountering dread one may "misunderstand the anguish of dread" and turn away from faith. He is thus "lost."

On the other hand, he who is educated by possibility remains with dread, does not allow himself to be deceived by its countless counterfeits, he recalls the past precisely; then at last the attacks of dread, though they are fearful, are not such that he flees from them. For him dread becomes a serviceable spirit which against its will leads him wither he would go. Then when it announces itself, when it craftily insinuates that it has invented a new instrument of torture far more terrible than anything employed before, he does not recoil, still less does he attempt to hold it off with clamor and noise, but he bids it welcome, he hails it solemnly, as Socrates solemnly flourished the poisoned goblet, he shuts himself up with it, he says, as a patient says to the surgeon when a painful operation is about to begin, "Now I am read." Then dread enters into his soul and searches it thoroughly, constraining out of him all the finite and the petty, and leading him hence whither he would go

It is this continual dance with dread and faith, the intertwining and mutual constitution that is so important here. To have faith, one must also dread, to have doubt about the existence of God, to not loose touch with the angst of finitude. To never doubt God, in other words, is to never really have faith. Turning toward faith in the constant face of dread, making that leap, that choice in everyday situations to affirm faith. In Kierkegaard's words: "Now the dread of possibility holds him as its prey until it can delver him saved int o the hands of faith."