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 interiority.
*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.
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Spiritual Prayer must have a Source, a First in which all resultant truths and acts find meaning and order within the Web of Being. This First Principle must be a relational One. Faithing in, therefore, must be relational.
The in hints of direction, movement. All relation is in motion. We cannot locate faith, for it is an action. You do not have faith, you faith, you trust.
For New Testament writers, faith is a relational term in the Christian Scriptures, for faith is an act of trust in a relationship. The apostle Paul says, "I know the one I faith in" - again, note the in. He speaks not of propositional, creedal, or sect faith.
Paul did not just inherit this faithing - it cannot be inherited or given by any religious body. He received it, as we do, through the influences of a social context. But there had to be more. Recalling Emerson, he had to encounter something or someone who confirmed itself, that called him to in. Recalling St. Augustine, there had to be an interior confirmation regardless of anything experienced externally.
Spirit witnesses to itself. Paul called this Christ. We need not be surprised he would experience the Truth in this manner, seeing he was a Jew and socialized on messianic expectations.
I was raised in an evangelical Christian home and nurtured in a like church in Georgia, United States. Then, no surprise, my encounter with Truth took the form of Jesus. The form may have been different if I had been born elsewhere, say Tibet or India. Yet, the in can be the same. The in is the connecting point, always moving, with the Beloved, Beauty Itself, by whatever form Grace appears to us -
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
*Rumi
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The key is not the form through which the Light appears to us. The key is faithing. Appearing is invitation. Faithing is yes. Without yes, there is no relation. With yes, there is Union between an I and a Thou. The in is Love. I becomes Love through in. We take on the nature of God through God.
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Imagine the following little tale with me, and we will see how it pertains to faithing, or trusting -
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: 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 had seen how they 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 wires leaping.
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 followed: "The Unseen Player is a myth."
What happened? The Unseen Player continued to play, undaunted by the disbelief of the mice, his playing delighting and comforting them.
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Faithing is rooted in the fertile ground of interior experience. We cannot borrow this. For faithing to be genuine and logical, such must be, in the late Leslie D. Weatherhead's words - the inner response of the heart (The Agnostic Christian). Hence, the reply must become, even if not initially, an inner, or heartful, reply. One can agree from the head, but only the heart can experience yes as the response to the Good, True, and Beautiful.
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*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2023. Permission is given to use photographs and writings with credit given to the copyright owner.
*Brian's book is An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love. The book is a collection of poems Brian wrote based on wisdom traditions, predominantly Christian, Buddhist, and Sufi, with extensive notes on the poetry's teachings and imagery.
