A New Kind of Faith

I want to know about faith- the kind of faith that’s found after loss. 

When I was a young woman my health collapsed, and I lost the life and identity I had had. But I had faith that the chronic illness I had would be cured, and I would once again be able to do all the things “normal” people could. Oh, I wasn’t passive- I engaged in pretty much every physical, psychological and spiritual healing modality, I could find. I learned a lot and I had months, sometimes a year of remission, but the disease never totally disappeared. With the natural changes of aging it became more acute and. . . I lost faith that anything would ever make a difference. 

I prayed for healing, but what I wanted (understandably) was a cure.

And now, strangely, I have found a renewed faith in healing. Not in a cure, but in healing. Interestingly, it has taken me almost three decades to really get the difference. This new sense of what is possible and good comes only after a dark period in recent years of finding myself bereft, separated from the old faith, abandoned by the deal-making deity in whom I professed no belief even as I semi-consciously tried to negotiate a back-room deal to earn a cure with personal work, sacrifice, and faux-surrender. (It's not real surrender if you keep peeking to see if the hoped for outcome is arriving.)

I am not saying that cures are not desirable or possible, and I leave the door to that possiblity wide open. But healing, for me, has become more important. And no, I am not making virtue out of necessity, because I only have to look around at the world to know that even if all conditions, including my health, were exactly as I thought I wanted them to be, true joy and peace could remain elusive.

Healing is about how I live this day fully, content with what I can do. If that's lying with my head packed in ice to dull the pain, listening to quiet cello music, I have discovered that I can cultivate real contentment with that, can be at peace with not being able to do what I'd planned.  

And a new faith- a faith in what is- takes root.

When I allow this faith to take me consciously into my experience- no matter what thoughts, emotions or sensations are arising- I drop down into an awareness of the divine spark, the kiss of the Beloved that perpetually renews. Hard to describe that experience of the infinite movement and deep stillness that is the ground of our being, but the consistent quality is one of an all-inclusive spaciousness, room for everything- all aspects of self and the world- nothing left behind, all that is accepted and held tenderly.

And my faith deepens, and I am held in and filled with an abiding contentment.This contentment does not preclude acting to co-create change where it is needed and possible.This contentment is active, involved, willing to do what needs to be and can be done without rejecting what is or desperately grasping for things to be different than they are. 

This new faith is flowering in me. It heals my relationship to the moment and all it holds, whether that is joy or sorrow, physical ease or pain. And I am deeply grateful.

Oriah (c) 2012