My journey towards faith – Part 1

-Written on Sept 14,2017

Faith is in itself a journey worth attending to. My faith has taken me on a journey so wild, this post may not be enough to capture the depths of it. But, today, I want to talk about faith. What is it for you? When I asked Bawa that very question, having lost it and searching for a way to connect to it, while recovering from a bizarre health issue that forced me to go on a medical leave to Mumbai, he simply said, ‘You already know what it means. That is it.’ Yet, it required me to chew on it a bit more.

Faith. Pragmatically, you have faith in that which provides, especially that which you desire. You develop faith in objects that have served you well. You expect the same service from them. You develop faith in your family, because they provide in a way that you can rely on. Unfortunately, religion ended up defining my faith in the divine to do something similar, to condition it based on a service for my wants and desires. I developed faith in God because of a few situations which went right. Having connected the two, my faith has become conditional on prayer for things to go my way, and when they get answered Im happy. Im grateful.

But, when you are on the path, divine makes sure your footing is sound. And, mine had to be broken to understand that faith is not for me to define, for me to condition God’s love and for me to choke him with my feverishness and desires for the outcome that I seek. Faith is coming to rely upon the infinity to work its will, for the laws of karma to play their hand however they may, for witnessing the divine’s intricate attention to every moment of this existence, with no bias towards one or the other. Faith is dropping me, and witnessing the flow of space, time, life and love through me. Faith is absolving the small mind from doership and resting in the divine’s way. So what this particular event didn’t go my way? An event exists in one unit of time and poof.. gone. What am I holding on to? A good has turned into my corner. I shouldn’t just be grateful for it, I should love it as much as the bad. Nature does not love making one miserable, then happy and keep one on a perpetual cycle of ups and downs. Nature does not know what it means to make one suffer. It only knows of life. So, grow with it.

What did it take for me to get there? A long story that requires many episodes of drama, love, anger, loneliness, depression, culminating in the great crash. I recovered and am well today, but we need to talk about it.