Though it may seem as though faith is absent more often than it is present, it is possible to strengthen this quality through silence and meditation. Like the sun and the stars, faith is a natural part of our soul life—we have only to learn to put our trust in this intuitive sense to begin to feel its healing effects. Faith is the fountain of spiritual discipline...an inner sense that allows us to bear with patience our doubts and despair, as well as the dry, depressing passages of life, knowing that somehow, some way, we are being led forward in the right direction.
One becomes an active participant in the world when he or she believes in something. Faith, optimism, and hope—we have to have those things as human beings; otherwise, life is unbearable because there is nothing that we can see beyond ourselves.
I have over the years dismissed simple faith, viewing it as either ignorant or stagnant. Only lately have I begun to recognize a profound quality of simple faith and the dynamism and struggle involved. It is easy to complicate one's faith. The real challenge is to maintain faith in all its simplicity! Simple faith clearly is a leap across the chasm of unanswered questions. That is the beauty of it.
~ from "The Gift of Simple Faith" by Richard B. Patterson in Spiritual Life, Spring '98
Real faith is rooted in a basic unknowing about ultimate things, and religion helps us to be in relation to that mystery. This kind of unknowing can offer calm or create anxiety, depending on a person's faith. Often people fill in this emptiness by insisting that they possess the truth. The fragility of their faith is betrayed by their strident insistence on being right and by their efforts to force their views on others. They seem afraid of the very things that define religion: mystery and trust.
...Consider this then: That there is a level of truth, vitally important to human beings, which lies beyond the explainable, demonstrable natural world. In fact, this truth is often more important and sustaining to human beings because it is an eternal truth, not changeable, never at the mercy of different historical theories, or the whims of the scientist, or the observer of heavenly bodies. This truth, in a sense, is our spiritual food.
The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together in a living whole, in which we are more and more able to transcend the limitations of our external self.
~ from NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION by Thomas Merton
Dear Friends ~ Last month pondering soul transformation led toward contemplating the universality of the cosmic dance. Though inner work is deeply individual, it also confirms our interdependence and the connectedness at the heart of the universe. Sixty people trying to move in the unfamiliar patterns of Gurdjieff's movements with awareness in mind, body, and heart brings one face to face with one's own personal journey. Yet it also confirms the truth that being human means being part of a collective--a complex set of dynamic interactions--a consciousness beyond ourselves. Stepping into that kind of experience is both humbling and liberating--I am neither more nor less than a part of this whole. Whether one calls this the communion of saints or a beehive-like synergy of Gaia or participation in the Body of Christ, it bespeaks a belonging, a mystery of simultaneous differentiation and union.
Deep within us, amid our differentiations as individuals and nations and species, is the desire for oneness. This holy longing is found not only in the human soul but in the soul of the universe, at the heart of everything that has being. We are not an exception to the universe. We are an expression of the universe. Our longings are a unique manifestation of the universe's longings. In listening to the depths of life, within our lives and within every life, we will hear the longings of the One that are deeper than the fears that divide us...There is no such thing as ultimate separation between one part of the universe and an-other, between the well-being of the human species and earth's other species, between the life of one nation and the rest of the world. We and all people, we and those who have gone before us, we and all creatures, we and the universe are traveling together in one river of life. We carry each other within us. And the universe carries us within itself.
Observing the rhythms of nature and recurring cycles of the year, Henry Beston describes what he calls the "pilgrimages of the sun" across the sky, and at night, strolling the beach, "the dust of the stars" that fill "the night sky in all its divinity of beauty." For a moment of night, we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars--pilgrims of mortality voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Nature is a part of our humanity and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery we cease to be human.
A great tenderness for myself and the world opens inside me, and I know I belong to this time, to these people, to this earth, and to something that is both within and larger than all of it, something that sustains and holds us all. I do not want to be anywhere else. I am filled with commitment...and compassion.
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
We all have moments in which we are jolted out of our habitual anxiety, when we surrender control and let go of self-conscious judgments In those moments we can just "be." We can feel refreshingly open, clear, and complete. Our mental clutter and confusions fall away, and we remember with great joy our oneness with all that is. At such moments the whole universe dances inside us!
Of all the world's errors, Dr. Paul felt the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, "the hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, not remember." I had wondered if there was room in his philosophy for anyone but the world's poor and people who campaigned on behalf of the poor...Embracing a continuity and interconnectedness that excluded no one seemed like another of Farmer's peculiar liberties. It came with a lot of burdens, yet it also freed him from the efforts that many people make to find refuge and distinction from their pasts, and from the mass of other human beings.
Only as we begin to open to others in love can our isolated ego be transformed. An awareness of our interdependence with other human beings and with all of life provides the environment in which the seed of our souls can flourish.
It is my hope that all the children, the children of the deer and the wolf, the whale and other marine forms of life; the children of the osprey and the bluebird and the butterfly; the children of the oak and the pine and the dogwood; the children all together with the human children will go into the future in oneness "as a single sacred community." ... The human is less a being on the earth or in the universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the universe itself. We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor do we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.
I will tell you one thing that will make you rich for life. There are two struggles: an Inner-world struggle and an Outer-world struggle...you must make an intentional contact between these two worlds; then you can crystallize data for the Third World, the World of the Soul.
The greatest reassurance--and I admit, frankly, surprise--came for me in our times of spiritual practice and in a Sunday morning Eucharist which palpably exploded with the presence of the risen Christ...While the courses of action that emerge from each one of us may differ, what was eminently clear to each of us was that this protective field of tenderness and responsive concern to our planetary anguish is alive and well, and that we can and MUST turn to it...daily, hourly, with our very best. In the best of Wisdom fashion, our hope shifted away from outcome and back to source.
The mind thinks of the self as separate, the heart knows better. As one great Indian master, Sri Nisargatta, put it, "The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it."
The wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit. Geese in a flock have greater range and fly faster than single geese as they benefit from the lift of their wings. When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back into formation and another flies at the point position. We fly in sacred community, interdependent with one another.
Greetings dear friends ~ Having recently participated in a weeklong gathering to explore the Enneagram in Motion, I have been pondering the nature of soul, transformation, and the interdependence necessarily at the heart of the evolution of human consciousness. Russ Hudson describes the inner work of the Enneagram as profoundly different from working on our "issues" so that we can become a better caterpillar. A caterpillar perseverates on devouring leaves and molting into a bigger, yet still identical, version of itself. One cannot grow wings and fly, however, without first entering a chrysalis and allowing the known self to dissolve into something new, capable of participating in the complex web of interrelationships at the heart of the cycle of life. Yet how much difference can our tiny, individual metamorphoses really make? I cannot begin to fathom how the beating of one butterfly’s wings could possibly cause even a whisper of a ripple on the other side of the globe.
