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Attentive to your interior life, take note and see what I say. I do not want you to depend on my authority by thinking that you must believe something because I have said it. If you do not see that something is true, in order that you may see clearly you should base your belief either on the Canonical Scriptures or on the truth manifested to you interiorily.
*St. Augustine. On Seeing God. In Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings. Trans. Mary T. Clark.
By a divine necessity every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.
*Ralph Waldo Emerson. Spiritual Laws. In The Spiritual Emerson.
RECEIVING SACRED TEACHING
Ultimately, true, spiritual Prayer must have a Source, a First in which all consequent truths and acts find their meaning and order within a Divine Order, in re-lation to the whole Web of Being.
The First Principle must be a relational One. One faithing in, then, must be in relationship to that Source of Faith. For New Testament writers, faith is a relational term, for faith is an act of trust in relationship.
St. Paul says, "I know the one I have faith in." He sets forth the relationship from which Christian faith grows and is Christian. He speaks not of propositional or creedal or denominational faith. He did not just inherent this faithing.
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Imagine with me the following little tale, and we will see how it pertains to Christian faithing...
A family of mice lived in a piano. In the piano-world they heard music with sound and harmony. The music comforted and awed them. They contemplated a Someone who gave the music. They spoke respectfully of the Unseen Player invisible to them.
Then, something changed, for one of the mice climbed up part of the piano, against the rules of the mice family, and returned thoughtful. He said, "The secret to the music is wires." He saw how they had trembled and vibrated.
The mice family deliberated seriously on the challenge to its belief. They decided to send a committee up to verify or not the witness.
The committee climbed up. They came back speaking of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires.
The mice family convened a council. They concluded that there was now proof that they existed in a mechanical and mathematical world. The official declaration: "The Unseen Player is a myth."
What happened? The pianist continued to play, undaunted by the disbelief of the mice family he loved and entertained with joy.
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True, spiritual faithing in is rooted in the fertile ground of personal experience within oneself. For faithing in to be true, spiritual, and Christian, such must be, as in the words of Leslie D. Weatherhead, The Inner Response of the Heart (The Agnostic Christian).
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