On Faith, Grace, and the Courage of Becoming

I have struggled with the idea of faith my entire life. From an early age my parents attempted (vainly) to instill a sense of faith that extended from my daily achievements and struggles to the more grandiose and universal. Instead I found guilt. This is something I am sure that many children of religious families struggle with—finding their place in the established faith of their elders.

By Apostolic definition, faith is "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen". What evidence can there be had but by experience? But what was my experience? As a child I had experienced no true adversity or pain. I knew how to open my heart to the Divine in only the ways that my parents interpretations of the scriptures showed, mainly as I explain earlier through guilt. So, is faith truly blind and limited to the things unseen? What does unseen truly mean? Is unseen synonymous with a lack of lived experience? Is faith a call for blind trust in that which cannot be experienced, and therefore unknowable?

I am struggling to write even this simple blog post, because of doubt. Doubt in my own ability to cognizantly embody and communicate what I have experienced and come to "believe". There is such a constant yo-yo effect between knowing and the experience of knowing and then fading back into disbelief, doubt, and depression. What is the source of this depression and ultimately doubt? Is this inherent in the condition of awakening—because make no mistake awakening is the condition that we are all existing in right now. I am just as present in awakening as you are. So, what is doubt but the awareness of something that seems to separate me from my awareness of the One?

Doubt seems foundational and fundamental to our experience as human beings. Our very experience is made up of doubt, and rightly so. Through experience we come to believe certain narratives and many of these are conditions that, apparently, keep us safe. In it's most simple form we question the nature of things that may hurt us: the temperature of a kettle, the wholesomeness of food kept too long in the refrigerator, the words of a stranger, the reassurance of a politician. In each of these examples complete trust can result in us being burnt, sickened, kidnapped, or led astray. Caution serves as a tool for the prudent and is often learned through hard earned experience. However doubt is a two edged sword.

When it comes to spiritual experience caution, practical skepticism, and pragmatism can easily blur into a behavioral pattern where doubt becomes an entrenched default. Doubt is easy, it seems. We doubt the motives of the stranger at a bar buying us a drink, but why do we doubt the motives and actions of the Divine? What evidence do we have that leads us to doubt?

Over the past two years I have experienced things that can only be described as miraculous. Over and over. Time and time again I have encountered what can only be described as prophecy regarding events unfolding in my life that have led to pain, joy, ecstasy, and glorious revelation. My life has altered course and edged into a current of mystery through Divine intervention and grace, and yet through all this doubt has still plagued me. Again I ask, what evidence do I have that leads us to doubt?

The answer lies in a simple realization that I have come to believe a story told to me, handed down through experience that trust in spiritual things is not to be given freely if at all and doubt is the path to true liberation. As a child I grew up in a religious household. Brought up as one of Jehovah's Witnesses I came to know the actions and commandments of a jealous God. Intense study of the Bible led me to know the image of this God, but the closer I got to understanding what I read in the book and the older I got the less I could believe what I read. How could a God of justice, love, and forgiveness rage at his imperfect people the Israelites smiting them and murdering them with a vengeance seen only in the behavior of a psychopathic child? How could humans be only six-thousand years old when civilizations whose artifacts have been radio-carbon dated to thousands of years previous? How can a global flood have destroyed the entirety of civilization and wiped out countless species when there is controvertible evidence of unbroken migratory patterns dating back far further than the so-called Biblical record? Doubt, it seems, is due.

I remember the exact moment at fourteen years of age, sitting in the hot living room of a family friend studying the book of Isaiah when the doubt became insurmountable and the established patterns of guilt and "faith" reinforced by years of indoctrination crumbled. I was broken, and doubt was the tool that had broken me. I had found my sanctuary in logic and reasoning and doubt was my savior. I would spend the next twenty five years allowing doubt to be the tool of my salvation.

During my mid thirties I had found new friends outside the Organization—loving and caring people who loved me for my logical mind, humor, and openness. I was presented with a dilemma though. One of my closest friends entertained me one evening with stories of a post-LSD trip experience: He and his wife were laying in bed when a glowing orb of seemingly supernatural origin floated down the hallway and entered their bedroom, stopping in front of their faces and disappearing. They both saw this apparition. I was dumbfounded. This friend was no fool. A college educated man, an attorney, and a man of profound logic and practical wisdom was admitting to me an experience that clearly could not have happened in the world that I had come to know. A world governed by mathematics, physics, rules. I had a choice. Do I doubt the veracity of the experience and allow my doubt to shatter our friendship and potentially my entire constructed worldview, or do I allow it and trust that this is indeed what he and his wife experienced? I chose.

The years to come would prove to be a whirlwind. Indeed my entire worldview was shattered, but doubt still persisted. In conflict constantly I managed to hold both truths at the same time: yes, this was a world of rules governed by physics but it was also deeply and strangely enchanted. How could I move forward with this confusing and seemingly conflicting discord that pointed truth in at least two directions simultaneously?

The best piece of advice that I have ever gotten is as follows, and I paraphrase: Allow the nature of things to disclose themselves. The spiritual and mystical practices that I have come to follow prescribe methods for addressing conflict. The binding of unhelpful behavior is a powerful bit of magick that cannot be simply described here, but it follows the advice that I mentioned above, namely to allow the behavior to demonstrate its nature, it's origin, and in the end the lie that you came to believe that acts in and on you that holds you back from your true potential. As in every meaningful time in my past when presented with a fork-in-the-road, I listened to the silent yearning at the core of my being and said "yes".

I don't know exactly how to put into words what the difference is in me since being able to see the lie that I came to believe in that Bible study group at fourteen years of age. It is not a conscious thing. It is not a logical process that I make use of. There is no technology. It is simply the freedom to say "yes" and believe in the process of my spiritual, mystical, and magickal work. The Divine is present, and always was. I never had anything to doubt except the false belief that doubt was the method of my salvation that I had taken to be the truth. And that's pretty rad.