This is a post from a blog I wrote a couple of years ago. I've moved it here as the old blog's been shut down now, and it needs a home somewhere! Meeting at the Well proper started in March 2011.
For a long time, I've thought faith was a feeling – that feeling that you're being looked after and all is well. Which, I figured, was why faith isn't something anyone can be talked into – you've either had that feeling or you haven't.
But it's just occurred to me that perhaps, like love, faith is not a thing you feel, but a thing you do.
However much you love someone, you're not in love all the time. You don't even feel loving all the time. So, if we want our relationships to last, we work to feed or to recreate the love. We make time to talk to our partners. We do things with them that we might not choose for ourselves. We make those small gestures that signal to ourselves, and to them, that this matters to us.
And even at those times when we just can't feel it, we try to keep acting lovingly, and we keep choosing to be where we are.
And I guess faith is like that, really. We can't feel that warm glow all the time, that blissful mixture of love and trust and joy. (In fact, if we've felt it even once, I think we can count ourselves pretty lucky.) Because that's a feeling, and (as a very wise woman once told me) all feelings pass.
So, in between those moments of feeling faith, I need to keeping choosing it and acting in the direction of it, as much as I can. I may not feel that sense of guidance right this minute, but I can choose to keep believing it's there and act accordingly.
And I think this is liberating, too. Sometimes I'm self-critical when I don't feel spiritually inspired. When you're starting a new practice, or have just experienced one of those little daily miracles, it's easy to feel inspired, enlivened. When I don't feel that, sometimes I tend to think that I must be doing something wrong.
But I can see now that that's crazy talk. Of course I get complacent. Of course the flame goes out. It's a feeling. And all feelings pass.
So instead of beating myself up about it, I can do the spiritual equivalent of making time for a long chat, or cooking a special dinner. There are a million ways to refresh and spice up your relationship with the godiverse.
If I'm really smart, I won't just wheel these out when things get dire, either; I'll build them into my life in some kind of repeating fashion. A daily prayer; a weekly ritual; a monthly divination session with friends*. And gradually I will learn that there's no need to panic if I'm feeling like throwing my toys out of the pram today, because that feeling will pass too, and soon one of these built-in things will refresh and reinvigorate me.
I mean, I know Rumi was all afire with passion for the Beloved, but I bet he did a whole lot of whirling to stay that way.
* Worked brilliantly for my lot a few years back, when we were all in the same town. It was a great way of what Havi would call 'staying in the process'.