I am both attracted to and resistant to the word “faith.” Particularly during times of great confusion and sadness like a human tragedy, faith seems both essential and elusive.
The other day I was forwarded an email from Brandon Nappi, the Executive Director of the Copper Beech Institute. The email blast was an organizational response to the most recent terrorism attack in Europe. In the email he wrote:
We as human beings are exquisitely vulnerable creatures who share a common trust that we will keep one another safe. This same vulnerability which makes possible the power of deep love and connection also leaves us open to being hurt.
“Exquisitely vulnerable.” So true.
So true in fact, that when I allow myself to really internalize the depth of this interconnectedness that could be used in the favor of help or harm, I can become completely overwhelmed.
In these moments of struggle I would like to turn to faith, but I am challenged to do so.
This morning I could see my husband in his own struggle.
It was before 6 a.m. and he was putting on his boots to leave for work. Another round of snow had come through, and it was already into April. As someone who plows snow for a living, my husband was not happy about the prolonged winter this year.
I was still sitting on my meditation cushion in the living room, and the kids were still asleep.
The weekend had been a tough one. Our elderly dog had died and our 2 kids had been sick with colds.
Now school was delayed due to the snow, and we were trying to figure out childcare and doctor appointments.
I could tell my husband was reaching the brink of overwhelmed, and usually I would be too, but in that moment, the funniest thing happened, a wave of calm came over me.
Not because I had some great plans to problem solve our over-filled schedules. Not because I had had a good night of sleep. No, if I had to guess, I would say it was faith.
This came as quite a surprise.
I remember as a child, maybe 9 or 10 years-old, I was introduced to Ecclesiastes from the Bible. I was not someone who ever read the Bible or was taught Bible stories per se, but on one occasion I was shown this verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, verses 1-8:
For everything there is a season, and
a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to
build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a
time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to
refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to
throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to
speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
Though not a Christian, I always loved this verse because at some mysterious level it spoke to an unarticulated truth that as a child I already knew. Some might call it faith- I did not yet have that kind of language for it.
As a very pragmatic and analytical person, faith has historically been extraordinarily difficult for me.
In the past I have found the evidence of my 5 senses in what I can see, smell, hear, taste and touch as well as my emotions to be the most reliable pathways to discerning what is happening in reality and how I should respond to it.
Faith has never fit in to the formula- or any other formula for that matter.
I did not intentionally exclude faith because I didn’t “believe” in it, no pun intended. I just have had no frame of reference for it.
There is a scene in the 1998 movie City of Angels with Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage when they are eating together at the farmer’s market and Nicholas Cage’s character, who is an angel (like from the heavens) named Seth, asks Meg Ryan’s character, who is a doctor named Maggy, to describe what a pear tastes like.
As an angel, he’s never experienced a piece of fruit in the way a human being could or would.
Sometimes that is how I feel about the spiritual domain with practices like faith. Like the angel Nicholas Cage with fruit, I get the concept of it because I have read a lot about it (in the movie the angel too refers to his reading of Ernest Hemingway’s description of food in The Moveable Feast), but the experience still remains foreign and unreachable.
My relationship with faith turned a corner however when I read the book (see I told you I’ve read a lot) Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience by Sharon Salzberg (2003).
I read this book in 2013 when I was pregnant with my daughter. I had had a miscarriage the year before, and it was very important to me that I manage my level of fear about this next pregnancy- I did not want fear to dominate.
Also, I had always been curious about faith. As a Unitarian Universalist who does not identify as Christian or Jewish, Muslim or Hindu (or any other faith-based belief system), I never really had a way in to this practice.
Which was why I was interested in a Buddhist take on faith; it sounded a little counterintuitive to say the least.
In the introduction Ms. Salzberg writes:
“I want to invite a new use of the word faith, one that is not associated with a dogmatic religious interpretation or divisiveness. I want to encourage delight in the word, to help reclaim faith as fresh, vibrant, intelligent and liberating. This is a faith that emphasizes love and respect for ourselves as a foundation. It is a faith that uncovers our connection to others, rather than designating anyone as separate and apart.
The faith I describe in this book does not require a belief system, is not necessarily connected to a deity or God, though it doesn’t deny one. This faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have – it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.”
After reading her book I began to see my meditation time as a practice of faith as defined most loosely, in its broadest sense.
Seeing faith as an aspiration that can be practiced resonated deeply with me.
Professionally, I spend most of my days teaching patients how to be more “skillful” over time with their emotions by practicing new strategies and interventions consistently. Therefore, it was not a big stretch for me to accept that a growing faith would also require regular and steady practice.
It has now been 3 years since I introduced my meditation practice to being a time to cultivate the seeds of faith.
In that time I have internalized an experience of faith that feels quite unimaginable to the version of me who needed someone to describe a pear to her.
Now, faith to me is an experience of being more okay when I don’t have the all the answers. It is an experience of trusting my own goodness and that of others. It is a belief that I will be okay, and so will my family, even if I don’t feel okay. It is an understanding that there are causes and conditions that create reality and reality therefore is as it should be.
The other day I read these words by Lao-tzu from the Tao Te Ching, a 6th century BC text for both philosophical and religious Taoism. He said:
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.
Three years ago I would have read these words and it would have been just that, reading; a purely cognitive experience of intellectual and spiritual curiosity. But today, it is different. There is a deeper resonance that I wonder if it may not be a fruit of my meditation practice.
This morning as I listened to my husband’s worries about work, the weather, our children, the dog, I couldn’t help but wish him the same kind of experience of faith that I was having at that very moment. I wanted to share my own momentary sense of equanimity with him so that he could enter his day with more balance and less fear.
So I said to him, as I still sat on my own meditation cushion,
“Come sit with me.”
It was an invitation to take a moment to focus on our breath and this one moment together. It was a moment to practice faith.
How do you practice faith?
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