Faith: Between Spiritual Ground and Sky
All our characteristics, even those that we view as most essential – including our spiritual gifts – are perhaps just functions of something that is both foundational to them and greater. Our best gifts and characteristics seem to approach this something, yet stand far from it.
Faith is a dim sense of the all-rightness of our connection to the foundation and our place beneath the greater canopy. Faith is a whisper, as soft but relentless as autumn leaves, that it’s somehow perfectly okay for us to live and move and have our being rooted in the context of a reality that is more than we can understand.
The Waking
by Theodore Roethke
Faith is a dim sense of the all-rightness of our connection to the foundation and our place beneath the greater canopy. Faith is a whisper, as soft but relentless as autumn leaves, that it’s somehow perfectly okay for us to live and move and have our being rooted in the context of a reality that is more than we can understand.
The Waking
by Theodore Roethke
Posted by Paul at 4:54 PM Permalink
21 Comments:
I seem to have always had that faith, somewhere within me. But I have not always lived faithful to that faith. I have strayed from it, forgotten it, lost it. Or used that deep knowledge of it to align myself with systems that claimed to embody it, which themselves led me astray, and were not needed, not helpful.
and i wish i stayed nearer to you. i am sure i will learn much. besides taking out your trash from time to time.
Just a thought. Good post as usual.
VINCENT: Right: faith and being faithful to faith – and, to begin with, becoming well aware of faith. Beliefs help some people with this and hinder others.
Either way, faith is a fact of experience. (I know I haven’t established this here, only just suggested it.)
MISTI: You really don’t, but I truly appreciate your kind thoughts. I’m leading a very high maintenance life here...
ENEMY OF THE R: You’re the first person I happen to run into who knows him. This is actually the only thing I’ve read by him, ran into it in an anthology – it does just have a mesmerizing effect on me, especially spoken aloud.
SHE
I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? —
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
She makes space lonely with a lovely song.
She lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.
We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
She cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;
She dances, and the ground bears her away.
She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.
I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.
Great post Paul.
Love,
Suzy
you're thought of. :)
LANCE: Or how about
Walk by faith because it glows in the dark...
I just came upon your site via Hilary's Clarity site ... Wow! Beautiful thoughts about faith ... very similar to my own ... Faith seems to be a quality that we writers & scribblers can go a bit bonkers over while trying to find words to capture it ... ;-D
I've come to sense that my own faith rests in the most (seemingly) ordinary gifts -- earth, air, fire, water, and spirit, and all their co-minglings and creations ... I guess if I had to put a name to my faith it's "pantheist" ... It's wordless, really ... and somehow you (from the little of your thinking that I've read so far) are able to suggest, through your subtle wordplay, what is beyond words and ineffable ...
Lately I've started to think of myself as "a gnostic agnostic" --> Way deep down, I *know* that Life is sustained by Something that I can't comprehend, and at the age of 49 that's good enough for me ;-)
All the best to you and thanks for being in the world!
For example, where you put the word "know" in quotes, I call faith "knowledge-like" - and really spell out what makes it that.
Also, it's fun to read - not a scholarly type of thing.
I'm being bad. But the book really is the best I have to offer; I spent 25 years on it through a level of adversity where you'd think it couldn't have been written.
That's my pitch!
Thanks for stopping by in any case and I'll be looking in on your blog as well.
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