Certain Kinds of Faith

 I was at the bank today dealing with RRSP contributions, and I realized, to my embarrassment, how little I really know about stocks or investments. It's something I haven't put much time into learning, to be honest, and all I could really do was follow the advice that my financial advisor had provided me. Because I trusted the advisor and could see her sincerity and knowledge, I ended up agreeing to what she was telling me to do. But there was a part of me that was thinking how foolish I must look to her, not having a lot of knowledge about investing.
  It seems like it's a good experiment to try to go out into the world without the presumption of expertise. The analogy I can think of is that of Saint Francis, who looked upon other beings as higher than him, yet still had the trust that he would belong with them in his encounters. This is a very tricky balance: having the faith that one can connect with others without necessarily speaking the same language with the other, much less even knowing the languages they speak. It seems to me that in order for a person to experience that, there needs to be two conditions. The first condition is the ability to see one's being as already belonging in the universe as a whole, particularly through the love of a compassionate or benevolent presence. The second condition is the sense of awe and wonder that comes from opening up to the things that are more than what we can chew. So, on the one hand, there is a sense of being harnessed by the ultimate benevolence of the world, while the second aspect is using that harness to confidently explore the worlds one does not know, yet have faith that they reveal and reinforce this original belonging.
     Without both of these conditions working in parallel with each other, one can go to two different extremes. The first extreme is trusting so much in one's own belonging that one reduces the world to a blasé sort of self-induced congeniality: grass is green, sky is blue, everything is part of my daily routine or habit. The second extreme is having a sense of awe but having no sense of one's belonging to that awe--which can create the terror of annihilation and fear of the other. When both attitudes of belonging and openness to the unknown go hand in hand, there seems to be a chance that the world is interesting enough not to be overwhelming.
   I am reading a book by Henri Nouwen called Discernment, where he talks about how people can recognize the unique calling that God is revealing to them on a daily basis. The interesting idea is that no matter what one's vocation turns out to be, it doesn't matter so much what one does as how one does it. There's no such thing as missing the boat but at the same time, one can be alive to the moment to moment possibilities revealed by the divine. The Buddhist way of looking at this is seeing the empty, mind-created nature of one's moments and transforming the phenomena back to mind. In these cases, awareness is inherently a part of the world, but it also infinitely beyond it: belonging and infinity going hand in hand.


Nouwen, Henri (2013) Discernment: Reading the Signs of Life. New York: Harper.