Faith is not saying everything is fine. Faith is saying "Get me through this. Get me through this. This is tough, it’s breaking my heart, it’s breaking my back. Get me through this."
Faith is also the capacity to recognize and hold to this truth: that Heaven can change your life in the blink of an eye. Faith is always holding out for that miracle. It's not a miracle just recognizing you can change this in the blink of an eye, and if this is what I have to endure now, then give me strength.
David Whyte
I wrote a poem about faith, written when I had very little faith. I started and the first line was, “I want to write about faith. I want to write about faith.” I was just getting my foot in the door. I didn't know what I was going to write about faith but I wanted to write about faith. Then suddenly this interior image of the moon arose inside me.
I want to write about faith, about the way the moon rises over cold snow night after night. Faithful even in its fading from fullness. Slowly becoming that last curving and impossible sliver of light before the final darkness. But I have no faith myself. I do not give it the smallest entry.
What I overheard myself saying in that poem was, “What would my life be like if I had equal faith in the part of me that was fading away as the part of me that was growing?” That was actually a radical question.
That there is a way in which we feel as if when things are going wrong, things are not going right, that I actually don't exist, there's something wrong with me, that I have to put it right.
Now if you look at the way life is, and actually spend half of life is growing and becoming and half of life is dying and fading away, and if you cut yourself off from the whole fading side of the cycle, you actually cut yourself off from half of yourself.
|
