Barry’s sermon last Sunday was about “faith,” if you had faith the size of a mustard seed you could move mountains. Someone in the choir spoke up, saying she agreed, maybe she even said having faith is easy? simple? Anyway she was in her relentlessly positive persona. They talked about how it wasn’t about “size.” I was uncomfortable with the whole thing. I don’t have faith like that. I started to feel that you either had faith or you didn’t, there was no way to build incrementally, and I certainly didn’t have faith or I would not be depressed. So I was making myself wrong. Only later was I able to look at it objectively.
So do I have faith? Yes, I have faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe, the goodness of the spirit that is creating the universe. I have faith that all things work together for good, but that doesn’t mean that we will all be safe and happy. It does mean that nothing is wasted. It does mean that we are all immortal, or we are all one, (or both) because how else could an ugly and painful life, I think of Barry who killed Evie and himself, how could such a life be redeemed? I do have faith — I’m not interested in moving mountains, but sometimes I wish I could magically bring myself out of depression, or even better bring it about that we would have world peace, justice, and environmental sanity. But I do have faith that depression is not some evil thing that afflicts me, depression is my god-given task. And my job is to stay present and bring compassion to it.
I offer myself to this process of grieving for Bella, and for all the other losses of my life that her death opened up. I’m willing to experience grief, emptiness, depression, despair, pain in the heart — in the faith that by experiencing them I process them, so the energy becomes available for living.
Looking back on this attempt to understand faith, what I see is that faith is like trust, or maybe it even is trust, it’s a choice, an action, not comfortable feelings. Even when I’m depressed, like today, I can still CHOOSE to have faith in the complex, interconnected and beautiful universe that I know about.