"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
I have a lot of blog ideas that start out as just the beginnings of ideas. I jot them down as draft posts and then forget about them. They sometimes come back around and resonate with me again, and then I finish them up and post them. This is one of those.
I was raised Catholic, and, as I tend to say, it didn't quite "take." That said, I feel like I've gradually built a fledgling, practical spirituality based more on my life experience. From that perspective, I use the word "faith" in the sense of: no matter how dark and difficult things might seem right now - no matter how much I can't really see how things will turn out well - things actually will turn out well if I simply have faith and allow it to.
Which has led to the title and topic of this post.
Faith that things will actually turn out OK is, of course, hardest when it feels like exactly the opposite - that everything will NOT turn out OK, but spectactularly and permanently badly. Which, I suppose, is exactly the point and definition of faith. As they say, it's easy to have faith when things are going well.
And so it occurs to me that the experience of faith - faith in its truest action - is not necessarily a positive experience. While the word sounds uplifting ("FAITH!!"), the experience itself is not uplifting at all. Faith in true practice is actually a maddening mix of a positive outlook, along with sadness, anger, frustration, and, at its deepest, elements of despair.
Because why does one need faith if there seems to be some positive solution to a situation? If there is even a glimmer of hope, it's relatively easy to have hope. It is only when there seems to be no hope, no solution, no end - when there is despair, deep in the soul - that faith becomes one of the only options (other than compounded despair, dissociation, breakdowns, psychotic breaks, or self-harm, among others).
Is this a new concept? No, of course not. But the experience and the realization seem new to me. In the face of overpowering and unexplained occurrences and emotions, where one's basic beliefs come into question - what is one to do? When one doesn't FEEL as if everything is going to turn out all right? Where does one turn?
There seem to be two options. Follow that feeling of despair and descend into that dark and deep pool. Or repeat to oneself, even as some part of oneself screams and cries against it, "everything will be OK."
Maybe even "everything IS OK".
In writing this down, this seems overly simplistic. Living the experience - getting to the point where one is truly not sure whether one will ever get out of that pool of despair - draws out the awful paradox of this.
Life change happens one small step at a time, with simply doing something different. Thinking something different. Believing something different. For a moment. For a day.
This is at the heart of change: proving to oneself, in very small steps, that perhaps one doesn't know or understand the full plans of one's life - which is what ego wants to believe. Or perhaps not proving anything, but simply being willing, for a moment, to believe that things can be different, despite current appearances.
Having the courage, perhaps, to let go of the thought that one knows what's going on, and allowing life a small chance to lead you someplace new.
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