I think that I was at the Norwalk, Ohio dragstrip when I saw the Blind Faith funny car.  A funny car dragster is a hand built race car, with a fiber glass body loosely mimicking one of Detroit’s products, a Camaro or a Mustang.  The entire body tilts up and away from the motor and the chassis.  The motor is a horsepower making monster, fueled either by methanol or by nitro-methane.

I am sorry that I did not introduce myself to Dave Edstrom when I had the opportunity.  I remember seeing him standing in the bright sunshine next to the exposed motor of his car.  He held a torque wrench in his hands.  He was smiling and I could recognize that he was blind.  Here is his story taken from his facebook page.

Dave Edstrom, of Minneapolis, drove his own Top Fuelers in the 1970s before losing his sight in 1975 due to diabetes. In a truly inspirational story, he put Richard Rhoda in the car and learned to tune the car by sound and touch and named it Blind Faith. Edstrom’s son, Mike , later took over the controls of the dragster but crashed it, and the team made the jump to Funny Car.

I marveled, felt awe that here was a blind man tuning a race car by feel and by sound that sighted men, experienced at the craft of fuel-motor tuning find a difficult challenge.  The respect that I felt for him was immediate,  palpable.

After some years of reflection upon life and upon the subject of faith,–it seems to me that “faith” whether of the religious variety, or the more down to earth variety of tuning an exotic race car, is more about the feel of things than anything else.  Faith is about falling in love with the elements that life presents to us, essentially by the feel of things, their texture, their smell, the sensation of the heat-of-life upon our body, our physical existence.  To put it bluntly, we fall in love, and that allows permission, to give ourselves “in faith” to the object of our passion.

Dave loved drag racing and everything associated with it.  He loved the bonding with family members around the care and maintenance of the race car.  He loved the ragged, ear piercing crackle of the fuel motor warming up in the spring.  He loved spinning the wrenches to drop the oil pan to check the crank bearings after a run.  He loved feeling the car move, the chassis flex as the car launched, and “got up” on the slicks, when the starting light flashed green.  He loved all of that and much more.  That was living and he was not going to give that up just on account of being blind.

So I think that “faith” is like that.  It is a variety of love, of self-surrender and is evoked by life itself.  It is much like a choice that one has to make, something that one cannot refuse.  It’s like hearing one’s name called, and how can one not raise one’s hand to answer?

Of course doubt is not excluded, since doubt, questioning ourselves is indelibly human.  Anyone responsible for running a Nitro fuel funny car or dragster constantly worries about the cost of the effort.  “What will replacing that blown-up motor cost me?”  But one has to do what one has to do.

That is Dave Edstrom’s story and the story of each of us.  We are enabled to give ourselves, to dispose of ourselves to a path of discovery, of work, of a marriage relationship, of parenting out of love — we place ourselves in the way of what is to come, what is unseen, unknowable.

Blind Faith.