Havel - Faith III

"But what, in fact, is this genuine faith?  Where does it come from, what does it consist in and what is it directed toward?  I don't have an exhaustive answer, of course, so I shall try to indicate only a couple of obvious things.  Faith in this sense can, and usually does, assume specific forms, that is, it is usually 'faith in something,' but that 'something' is not the decisive factor, it is not, that is, a fetish of some kind, a challenge to which would either shake the faith or require  a rapid change of fetish.  Genuine faith is original, primal and discrete; it precedes its object (if it has one).  In other words, it is faith that animates its object, not the other way around.  (Naturally an opposite, 'reciprocal' tendency exists as well, but I think it is always secondary, a reflex caused by the main factor.)  This is one of the ways in which genuine faith differs from the optimist's enthusiasm: it does not draw its energy from some particular reality or assumption, on whose existence it is utterly dependent and with whose loss it would collapse like a pricked balloon.  It is not a state of enchantment, induced by the narcotic of an evocative object, but rather an intrinsic 'state of the spirit,' a profound 'existential dimension,' an inner direction that you either have or don't have, and which - if you have it - raises your entire existence onto a kind of higher level of being."

Vaclav Havel
"Letters to Olga"

As a Mormon, how do I take this description of faith - that the experience supersedes its object?

As one for whom faith is, by definition, "Faith in Christ," it seems unlikely that I could agree with the statement that my faith's object, Christ, is not the 'decisive factor.'  And yet, I catch a meaning here that does to some degree accord with my experience--

Faith is a relationship of trust with God.  Your conception of God may be incomplete and partially erroneous (and whose isn't to some degree?), but your experience with his reality has built a trust that is not dependent on the perfection of your personal conception.  I've known plenty of Mormons whose faith was in what Havel calls a "fetish" - a particular, concrete conception of how things are.  When such a person runs into a thorny knot where some portion of Joseph Smith's life doesn't seem to match one's picture of what the prophet should have been like, or the understanding of 21st century science doesn't match one's understanding of what our doctrine is, he often turns (sometimes with astonishing rapidity) to a positivistic atheism in response.  His faith was never a genuine relationship with deity (genuine faith is a little more difficult to shake than that).  He believed in the finger that pointed at the moon, but never really had that deep of an experience of the moon itself.