Faith is Trust in Life
My faith was awakened gradually, then all at once. I’m not only talking about a religious or a metaphysical sentiment, I mean trust.
When all that was familiar is stripped away, when the powerlessness of experts is made clear, when my own body has been spent of all its resources, I am left with a choice. I can take a leap of faith, knowing that the fall will yield change. I cannot know where my fall will take me, but I choose to initiate the leap without needing to know the outcome ahead of time. That's what I trust.
In 2017, my staunch, angry, teenage atheism started waning. For a decade I had been angry at the world, at myself, at the doctors. I started practicing mindfulness with an app, to help my insomnia and anxiety, but not to connect to spirituality. It was the beginning.
That year I was travelling with a friend. One night, they were praying with their tasbih prayer beads in silence. I was curious, but didn’t dare approach. They waved me over, and shared simple wisdom: God loves company.
The seed sowed before my birth, long dormant and buried by the secular nihilist culture of my upbringing, had just received a drop of water. The strict minimum needed to germinate.
By 2019, I was conducting little rituals. I’d realized that writing and poetry are magical acts. I composed poems and recited them to a thunderstorm. I prayed to the clouds. That year I finally cried tears I had not let flow in all those years of internalized spiritual repression, and I was utterly confused. I thought that spirituality wasn't for me because the religions of my grandparents didn't suit me.
I did not yet know that the essential centre of spirituality is simply the longing for union. For me, it's about having faith in the process of trial and error, getting up and trying again. There are a million formulas to learn for spiritual growth: "stand here, do this, think that, and all your problems will be solved."
But there’s no barometer for measuring and quantifying faith. It's my experience that any instruction for solving my problems doesn't work unless it comes from my heart, from faith in my own capacity to love life.
In the depths of failure, when all illusions of control over my life are trampled by the chaotic dance of my body's dysfunction, there is nothing to do but accept. If I refuse, then I am ignoring reality and rendering all further action moot. It becomes useless because it does not have a sound premise. So I must accept if I am to proceed.
Acceptance is how we get to the root. Only self-knowledge that comes from surrender can provide answers to my suffering. No one will ever know its source except you and whatever higher power you choose to put your faith in.
But that kind of faith in oneself takes courage, and it takes time. It takes being ready and willing to develop all the skills to discern what is helpful and what is toxic, to sort between them, and to act accordingly. The strength to carry on is found in faith.
I’m cultivating trust in my body to speak the truth. If I only listen to it, it’s a reliable source amidst all the noise. But my body is not a private territory; it began as, and remains, an open territory subject to intervention from the time of my conception. My body is not separate from your body. The same systems of governance and control have shaped us both. We're byproducts of Empire.
My body is larger than the skin that envelops my organs. It is composed of the earth from which the food I digest grows; the migrant labour precariously tending the soil. My body is the struggle for self-determination, the pain of countless patients subjected to involuntary "care" over centuries. My faith accounts for the plasma donors selling blood in the USA. How can I hold their sacrifice with gratitude? I’m starkly aware that they likely were thinking of how the $60 helps them make ends meet, rather than me and my illness, in some far off and distant land.
When no system can be trusted, where do I place my faith? It is not a tool, nor an instrument with which to surpass my own body and its limits. Faith is moot unless it is joined with acceptance of reality. The process is engaged. The fire burns powerfully in the heart of hearts, where infinite passion resides. That is, love for all that is, was, and will be.
I have found that I can trust the earth, if nothing else. I can trust the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves. I can place my faith in the weight of gravity and the act of breathing. Faith belongs in the world. It's an anchor for staying tethered, keeping myself from spiraling into insomniac despair. The felt sense of faith is a vibration in my cells akin to the hum of a honeybee. It is imperfect, and I would still never return to a life without it.
Faith is my trust in that automatic, unconscious wisdom that carries me through life. It bubbles up when coincidence puts me in the right place at the right time with the right people. It is also my buoy when life challenges me, has me questioning why I was ever born, seemingly surrounded by all the wrong people in a place I can't bear. But then, I'm still breathing. Life is still happening.
Trust arises spontaneously when life demonstrates that it has an intelligence many orders of magnitude greater than any thinking mind. The breath, coursing through the lungs of my body, breathing by itself, will always do a better job of it than any attempt on my part to control its action. I need faith that I can, and will, keep breathing. The breath flows, and I carry on with my day.