It has taken me a long time to realize that
faith and belief [is] not the same thing… I wish I had known this sooner.
Confusion between these essential ideas created nearly insurmountable crises of
faith in my life just when I needed faith most.
Searching frantically for faith, I instead
pulled out an entire wardrobe of beliefs…My beliefs, however deep, broad,
educated, flexible, magical and divine, did not suit the crushing occasion.
As the experience continued and only got
worse, I felt terrified, naked, vulnerable, unfit, and unloved by a God I had
served well. On top of everything else, I was hurled headlong into an identity
crisis. “Who am I if not my beliefs?”
I think more people [discard]
God out of a crushing sense of having been abandoned by God first than for any
other reason. Were you abandoned by God or [your] own beliefs? When faith is on the line,
belief will almost always let you down. Let me explain why.
Belief is a product of the mind. A victim mind
is already disadvantaged, but even a healthy, enabled mind runs into trouble.
The enabled mind may say, “God is faithful. He will: answer my prayers;
cure my child; land the plane safely; reconcile my marriage; replenish my
wealth. God is just and will set things right.”
The enabled mind says that if we hold our
beliefs strongly enough, God will listen and favor us…Our beliefs are mostly
narrow and rooted in culture and upbringing. Sometimes our most closely held
beliefs are in direct conflict with everything else we know to be true.
If we decide or are told that the persecution
is God’s idea, or worse (His divine will) then how do we reconcile that deity
with the God of love and benevolence? It can be argued that we only arrive at
the intersection of faith and belief when we experience a life-threatening
trauma ourselves.
Once we do, we may be forced to change our
beliefs or go crazy… Changing our minds means [altering] at least some aspect
of our beliefs. Beliefs shift because viewpoints are modeled on personal and/or
communal experience. And a belief, just because it has been handed down to us,
is not necessarily true even when we think it is…
Belief is a product of the mind, but faith is
not. Faith is a [creation] of the spirit. The mind interferes in the process of
faith more than it contributes to it. To have faith in the worst of times will
no doubt require us to silence, or at least quiet, the mind.
Faith is what happens when our beliefs run [ashore].
The spirit can be buoyed by our beliefs, but can also be brought down by them
when they prove inadequate, as they most certainly will at some point in the
journey. Even the beliefs humans have held most closely have come and gone over
the course of a lifetime or a millennium…
We can believe an abstract truth, but as a
result of our human limitations, we can never really know…In time, as new
spiritual and cultural information is revealed, former so-called truths can be
revealed as arbitrary, false or irrelevant; i.e., slavery,
polygamy, gender and race inequality, and previously sanctioned abuses by
social, political and religious authorities.
Beliefs come and go, but real faith is not so
fickle. Real faith is not a statement of beliefs, but a state of being. It is
living life midair — standing commando on a tightrope fifty stories up with no
preconception of the outcome. It is trusting beyond all reason and evidence
that you have not been abandoned.
To commit to faith is not the same as
committing to a set of beliefs. In the throes of crisis it is impossible to
know what the [mysterious] God… is really asking of us. But in the void of not
knowing, we may ask: Is God [really
asking this] of me…?
The answer of faith: It doesn’t
matter. You don’t know now and you may never know. To not know in the
context of faith is to remain humble and teachable.
To toss away the conflicting and unusable
beliefs of the mind is to be free of human chatter…and a step closer to the
divine. Where faith does not fill in the cracks, fear will. Faith is an
attitude of acceptance of not knowing. Knowing does not create faith, [but unknowing]
does.
The next time you find yourself in spiritual
crisis, my advice — attach no value to it, positive or negative. Release your
beliefs for the time being, and do not labor at bringing them into congruity
with the crisis.
Have faith that whatever is happening to you
now will be neither lost nor forgotten [by God. The truth will be] witnessed
and acknowledged…With time and maturity, all…will be made clear [eventually in
this world or the next].
*Adaptation
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