Everything Takes Faith
April 30, 2022Sometimes, I feel like you hate all religion. I confessed to my husband, who was quick to point out my own lifelong rejection of organized religion, and of course, he’s not wrong. I have one issue or another with just about every organized institution of spirituality, but I don’t hate any of it.
I clarified: If someone is religious, I immediately feel a kinship with them. I feel like our spirituality is something we share.
He said, Sure, because you both have faith. It takes faith to believe in the invisible.
I paused.
No, it’s not because of faith. We all have faith. Everything takes faith.
There’s this great misnomer that faith is what separates the spiritual from the secular, but really, I think maybe it’s just the recognition and acceptance of faith that spiritual people have in common.
The reality is that there is no way to know a single thing in this world with absolute certainty. To believe that you know anything requires faith.
It takes faith to believe that I’m sitting here in bed, in a house in Ohio, typing on a computer.
It takes faith to believe that you are reading these words right now on whatever device you’re reading them, wherever you are.
The mere act of trusting and believing in your daily existence—moment to moment—takes faith.
We could all be living in the matrix or existing as brains in vats. We really just don’t know.
But most of us accept that we aren’t living in the matrix. We believe that we are real, living, biological animals on this planet earth in a solar system of the Milky Way. We believe the many things that science has demonstrated to be true, and I am not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t believe these things. I am simply saying that believing in those facts—believing that they are facts—requires faith.
It requires faith in the information you’re receiving. It requires faith in your perception of reality. It requires faith in the scientific method. There is a foundational leap of faith in the unknowable that life asks all of us to take if we are to believe in anything. We are all creatures of faith.
On any given day, you are flexing your faith nearly constantly. You are making assumptions. You are choosing to believe various things, and you are enjoying the freedom you have to place your faith in whatever you choose.
Personally, I decided a long time ago that the only thing I can really place my faith in is my direct personal experience because ultimately, it’s all I have. Everything I’ve ever read, learned, done, talked about, thought, seen, felt—every single aspect of my life—has been filtered through my senses, my perspective, my mind. I don’t have any “thing.” I only have my experience of “things.” We are all limited by our individual perception. My experience is all I have—just as your experience is all you have.
So for the sake of not falling into the deep dark hole of total skepticism, I have chosen to have faith in my experience. That doesn’t mean that I know everything about what my experience means or that I think my perception is infallible. It simply means that I have faith that I am here, living this life and having this very real experience, and by placing my faith in this simple foundational fact, I have come to perceive so much more than I ever thought was possible.
As I went deeper and deeper into my own experience, my hyper-rational godless reality was turned on its head.
I started to feel God, to hear God, to see God.
Something called God became tangible.
Now, I believe in God—as much as I can believe in anything—not because someone told me God was real, but because I perceive God, because in my personal daily experience, the so-called spiritual layers are not invisible. They are ever present.
My gripe with organized religion is that so often it encourages people to follow blindly. Many religions have the nasty habit of disempowering people’s individual perception and asking them to place their faith instead in what they are being taught, but in my experience, God appears most clearly when you fall into the wild of your own being, not the dogma of others.
Every time I have a dream that comes true or know things before they happen or have a vision with imagery and words that I later learn exist in texts I’ve never read, I am filled not with faith but with knowledge. Faith is simply the thing that allows me to accept that any of this life is happening at all, and once I accept that and I look at my experience, I then see all the knowledge I’ve gained through my experience of science and history and other people’s stories and also through the information that I receive intuitively and magically, which in my case has proven itself to be consistently reliable and trustworthy.
I don’t feel a kinship with other spiritual people because they have faith. I feel a kinship with them because maybe we have some shared information, some shared knowledge, and maybe in their company, I won’t feel like my experience is invalidated.
So much of the secular world asks me to not have faith in my experience, to instead trust its determination that God is not real. I find that the secular world—in its absence of awareness around its own faith—is just as guilty as many religions of asking people to follow blindly the teachings of its books.
And so actually, no. No, it’s not faith that makes me feel a kinship with other spiritual people. Faith is the thing that makes me feel a kinship with everyone.
We are all here in this crazy, mysterious world, taking one leap of faith after the next. We are all asked every day—whether we know it or not—to live on faith. Everything takes faith.
Faith is not what separates us. Faith is what unites us.
