Excerpts from Original Faith

Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: What Love Is
Chapter 2: Despair Under Heaven
Chapter 3: The Fact of Faith
Chapter 4: Stumbling Block: Ego
Chapter 5: Willingness and Practice
Chapter 6: The Nature of Work
Chapter 7: Nature's Work of Transformation
Chapter 8: Working from World-Center
Chapter 9: Owning the Greater Claim
Afterword: Owning the Darkness

From the Introduction

We often approach the issue of meaning in life by looking for a reason to live. Real meaning resides in the experience of our love, its purpose, and the self-transcendent identity to which it calls us. A meaning to life is not some series of patches we apply to holes in a fragile raft of reasons by which we can somehow hope to float over the sheer mystery of being here to live and die. Meaning in life is learning how to swim and how water feels against the skin. It is feeling what it's like to go with the flow and what it's like to struggle against strong currents. It is knowing water as our own element: from out of which we were born, into which we can live, and into which we are to die wonderingly. Though we may not fully know the meaning of life, we may fully live it.

Excerpt — The Faithful

When people are asked about their faith, they usually reply in terms of whether they are members of an organized religion. If they are not, they are likely to designate themselves as "not religious" or "not very religious." When asked about faith, people tend to think first of systems of belief rather than something they have experienced or the quality and development of that experience.

Every one of us is born to a lived experience of faith and dies in either its denial or development. To become faithful is to highlight the fact of our faith with our growing awareness of it.

Many of us grow in faith through organized religion. However, I am interested in focusing on what unites us. It will be a sad commentary on how we handle our inherited traditions if religion proves more a source of division than a force of great-hearted mutual inclusiveness as the world becomes one. In this chapter we will look at faith experience as it occurs to human beings without specific regard to our belief systems. You will find that this material opposes your beliefs only if you believe that you lack faith.

Excerpted from Original Faith by Paul Maurice Martin Copyright © 2007-2008 Lynne Ann Martin. Excerpted by permission of Lucid Interface LLC. All rights reserved. No part of these excerpts may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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