The Book of Practical Faith
4th Edition
by D. Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2012 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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C o n t e n t s
II. Gathering Trust
III. Practicing Patience
V. The Rewards of a Practical Faith
FAITH is a more practical way to deal with everyday life than cynicism, toughness, or defensiveness. Faith can be sensible and savvy, and practicing it daily increases its usefulness and reliability. Yet faith is also tinged with mystery, for it is the connection to our unknown potential and the power of creation itself. Faith is the way out of misery, the way in to self-knowledge, and the way toward a more fulfilling and effective life.
Most people might define faith as a “belief in God.” This book is about faith as learning to maintain a constant contact with God. By “God” I mean the universal and marvelously creative energy that moves us all. By recognizing and affirming that energy, we can become increasingly peaceful and wise.
Of course, belief and faith in God can coincide, and strengthen each other. But I believe it is also possible to practice faith — to honor, share, and benefit from divine energy — without any particular religious belief or affiliation. This is my personal experience.
On the other hand, it is easy to see the damage done in the world by people promoting religious beliefs which are not backed up the practice of a wise and tolerant faith. Thus, practicing faith is not the same as holding fast to a religious belief against all the slings and arrows of reality. In fact, faith is weakened by too much believing. Faith is the willingness to take a chance on what we do not yet believe, for the sake of finding greater happiness, and spreading and sharing peace.
I'm convinced that what most people long for is the constant experience of faith in their lives. Obviously, few people identify their longings that way; they are more likely to say they seek intimacy, excitement, comfort, wealth, status, or power. But these objectives are longed for because it seems they would supply what is missing in people's lives. In general terms, what people miss is a sense of stability, security, and fulfillment in everyday living.
The great secret of a practical faith is that it can supply the core of what we long for, even if we never achieve the particulars. Faith does not replace longing, but it does refocus longing on inner qualities that can be strengthened through contemplation and practice regardless of one’s outer circumstances. By supplying the essence of what we deeply seek, faith also reduces our fear, self-absorption, and competitiveness, thus bringing about a greater harmony between people.
The miracle of a well-practiced faith is that it eventually provides rewards that surpass the mere fulfillment of our desires. That is my conclusion after more than twenty years of investigating faith as a personal practice. I have written this book to pass on the good news of my experience: that the essence of whatever we long for in life can be attained through practicing faith, and such a practice can be undertaken by anyone with a little willingness to attempt it. Because faith may still be perceived as a vague religious ideal by many — or something that, like blue eyes, you’re either born with or you aren’t — I’ve tried to offer pragmatic steps toward the adoption of faith as a spiritual discipline that can be pursued without any particular religious conviction.
IT MAY seem odd for a journalist to write an inspirational book about faith. At moments it has seemed very odd to me. When I was a young reporter I valued rationality and skepticism above all else, and I thought of faith as an attitude of gullibility held chiefly by churchgoers. To me, all faith looked blind: a deliberate refusal to face cold, hard reality in order to hold on to useless religious ideas and superstitions.
Yet beneath this judgmental attitude — which I mistook for sophistication — I never entirely lost the sensation of something nameless abiding within me. When I was a boy I would feel this presence strongly while standing beside my father inside the open garage, the two of us leaning against the trunk of the family car, wordlessly watching a curtain of soft rain fall just inches in front of us. If it had been raining for a while we could see the small creek down the hill start rising, mud-brown, to the top of its banks.
Like a lot of nuclear families in the 50s and 60s, we had some troubles that made life jumpy and unpredictable. But when I stood before the rain with my father, I felt a silent, inexpressible knowledge that there was some kind of peace flowing constantly underneath all our troubles. The trick was to recall that deep-down tranquility when I needed it most. Even when it wasn’t raining, I could usually tap that peace again by running into the woods with my dog and conversing, quite naturally, with the trees.
In adolescence I began to lose touch with the peace I found in nature. I would still go into the woods, but I seemed less and less able to shed my growing anxieties. It would be a long time before I realized that my personality as a young adult was composed largely of confusing, competing, and conspiring anxieties about my worth and purpose. Although people told me I showed an outward calm, my inner life was considerably more tumultuous.
I also felt there was a lot wrong with the world, and it seemed that the best way I could help correct things would be to use my natural writing talent to become a crusading reporter. My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t prove tough enough, that I would be fooled by all the deceivers and perpetrators of evil out there. So I studied the ways of the great investigators, from Lincoln Steffens to Woodward and Bern-stein, and my reportorial ambitions were fueled by the most dramatic news of the time. A college re-porter during the Watergate hearings, I was standing in the back of the Senate chambers when the existence of the Nixon White House tapes was revealed. The intrusive, distrustful press seemed invincible to me then.
But I didn’t last long as an investigative reporter. I found myself involved in bitter controversies in-stead of great crusades. I felt that I was making more enemies than allies despite my best intentions, and there was precious little evidence that I was really helping anyone. The more important the story, the more stress it created for me, and the sicker to my stomach I became. Gradually I grew ever more wary and distrustful of people in general. I distinctly felt that I was going astray.
What that meant — although I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time — was that I was about to lose all contact with my inborn, deep-running faith, that “sense of abiding.” I did not get closer to faith after distancing myself from investigative journalism, but neither did I get any farther away from it. I just tried to make a living and grow up, neither of which I did very well.
When I fell seriously ill (with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) in my early thirties, I happened onto a surprising revelation. Broke, sick, unable to work, feeling as alone as I had ever been in my life, I realized one day that it would be all right to die. I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to die, and I had no wish to end it all despite my considerable pain and loneliness. Rather, I simply felt that whatever I had done or not done so far in my life was acceptable and honorable, and that I had nothing to prove — if I ever really had. The drive in my life to lead a crusade, to make a name for myself, but most of all, to convince everyone that I was right — that drive was surrendered. After all, I could hardly get out of bed, and the prospects for the next day were just about the same. I realized that I might as well accept myself as I was — just a being doing nothing — and see what happened next without a plan.
Now when I look back on that moment, I recall the rain-swollen creek of my childhood overflowing its banks. You might say I was in the middle of an instructive catastrophe. My body, the part of me that was continuous with nature, had overwhelmed my rational, ambitious, and anxious mind that had so long led me to feel separate — from nature, from other people, from God. Then I shed tears upon tears, a flood of grief that that began to cleanse me of old ways of being.
This was when faith began to wash back into my consciousness after so many dry and doubting years. Because of these changes, my health slowly began to rebuild itself and my life took a new and unexpected direction. I returned to journalism, but with a different focus than before. I became an investigator of human consciousness.
No longer interested in documenting human flaws and failures, I felt inspired to report instead on the psychological and spiritual keys to human transformation. This field — which I call the “journalism of consciousness” — was wide open; even today my peers are easily counted. It may not always be that way, for I am convinced that we are on to the story of this new millennium. The next great evolution will be spiritual in nature, not political or technological, and this evolution is in fact already underway. But don’t expect to read about it in the papers or see it on TV news very often. On this story, popular culture is well ahead of the mainstream news media.
NEAR the end of the classic adventure film “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” the hero faces the last and most fearful of three challenges he must surmount before he can gain entry to the chamber wherein rests the Holy Grail. Earlier the swashbuckling archaeologist has been told that “the search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine within all of us”— but as we know from Indy’s previous adventures, inward searches are not his style.
Standing before a wide, bottomless chasm, he holds a mystical map that inexplicably portrays a knight walking on air across the chasm. Comprehending that must take a “leap of faith,” Indy holds his hand to his chest, blinks, gulps, and then takes a big, cinematic step into the void. His foot lands on solid rock. Now, from a perspective changed only a foot or so from a moment before, Indy can clearly see a path that was totally camouflaged from view before his leap of faith. He crosses over and scatters glistening sand behind him to reveal the way to those who will follow.
This scene is a true and accessible illustration of the nature and practicality of faith. Faith is always a crossing from the known to the unknown. Ultimately it can provide knowledge of our wholeness, or “holiness,” wherein lie our real security, stability, and fulfillment. Like Indy’s map, any guide to the unknown is necessarily mystical and suggestive, rather than logical or definitive. And the purpose of faith is not to uphold a prior belief in something already known, but to advance our perspective on what lies ahead. Sometimes a leap of faith affords us only a few inches of progress, yet the subtlest shifts of view can provide enormous insights and a crucial understanding of the path before us. Finally, one who has crossed over a seeming void can help illuminate the way for others who may follow.
With this book I am trying to scatter a little bright sand on the paths across chasms that I have already traversed, and encourage readers to approach the leaps of faith that are theirs to make on their own. This book recommends surrender as the route to power, and inspired risk-taking as the key to security. I hope that readers will examine the path I am describing with curiosity, skepticism, and a sense of adventure — the same qualities that have stood me in good stead in my own research and experience of faith.
THE “practical faith” I am attempting to describe might also be called a spirituality of ordinary life. My experience with this spirituality arises from a life-long dedication to the big questions: “Who am I?”, “Why are we here?”, “What is the best way to be of use?” I’ve never traveled to the East, nor surrendered myself to a guru, nor joined any religious organization to pursue these questions. Instead I’ve investigated them in the midst of trying to make a living, develop healthier relationships, and deal with all the challenges and limitations of being alive on this earth.
Over the last twenty-plus years, I’ve concentrated with greater clarity on the big questions and made them the focus of my profession as a reporter, author, and publisher. I have had personal contact with a number of extraordinary teachers who have significantly influenced my development. What I have to say about a practical faith thus represents a unique confluence of many voices and perspectives.
For all the problems of Western society at the present time, I feel that one of its great strengths is the opportunity it provides us to merge our dedication to democracy and free-thinking with the world’s great spiritual traditions, most of which have tended to be autocratic in nature. This book, like others in recent years, is part of a nascent tradition that might be called spiritual democracy — a path of many influences, a path both practical and profound that can be pursued by anyone in the midst of ordinary life.
Where a conventional reporter uses facts and figures to bolster his conclusions, I offer insights and intuitions. These are my tools of investigation, and I am deeply grateful, to fate and to faith, for being able to offer these tools for use by others. I could not imagine a more exciting story to be working on at this time in human history. It is an assignment I could not even have imagined in my cynical years, and yet it is rooted deeply within me. I’ve been assigned to cover faith by faith itself. I hope that my reportage is accurate and compelling enough to encourage others to investigate this priceless path to happiness and wholeness as well.
Practical Faith
The following four steps toward a practical faith are both sequential and simultaneous. This kind of paradox is often experienced in the process of building faith.
Releasing Guilt is the removal of a common obstacle;
Gathering Trust increases strength, something akin to spiritual bodybuilding;
Practicing Patience changes one's relationship to time, replacing clock-watching with a calm abiding;
and
Learning Transcendence opens one's vision to more frequent and inspiring glimpses of the infinite.
G u i l t
What stands in the way of faith is not cynicism but guilt. While cynicism is a compensation for living faithlessly, it is paradoxically a kind of faith itself. Instead of relying on hope, possibility, and the best in other people, the cynic relies on disappointment, pessimism, and distrust. By maintaining this attitude he hopes to cut his losses and be amply prepared for the next insult or disaster that life sends his way.
Cynicism seems to have a lot going for it in the modern world. Any cynic worth his salt would say it’s always been the best policy. I know that I didn’t give up cynicism until it utterly failed me as a means of self-protection. I reached a point in life where I had nothing left to lose but life itself, and even that didn’t look like much to hold onto. As I began to understand the psychological roots of my physical collapse, it became clear that my cynical, stressful attitudes toward life had delivered me into this catastrophic condition. But that wasn’t the biggest surprise I experienced. The real shocker was comprehending that the source of my cynicism was neither the sorry state of the world nor any betrayal I had experienced at the hands of other people. The source of my cynicism was my own guilt: about what I had done and not done with my life, about my family of origin, about my intimate relationships, about sex, about food, about almost anything you could name.
When all this self-judgment became overwhelming, then I decided that the world was in terrible shape and that I had to maintain a wary, jaundiced point of view lest I be victimized by someone. All the while, of course, I was the one doing the most damage to myself. It is the peculiar torture of the cynic to be wearing full battle dress on the outside while the enemy is on the inside, ravaging the soul’s territory.
The enemy is guilt. Guilt arises from the reluctance to change. If we harm someone or violate our own inner sense of right and wrong, we should feel a sense of alarm. In response to that internal alarm, we need to acknowledge our error and either correct or try to make up for it. At the very least, we need to start changing inwardly, changing into someone who would not make that mistake again. It’s when we don’t act inwardly or outwardly that we begin to accumulate guilt.
While it’s true that we may finally act responsibly when guilt becomes unbearable, guilt should not be mistaken for a positive motivation in itself. Some-thing else within ourselves — the soul that is always yearning for greater clarity and purposefulness — will eventually recognize that guilt must be released and real change undertaken.
The first step toward a practical faith is the most radical, for our belief in the value of guilt is incredibly powerful — bred in the bone, it seems. Questioning a single particle of our guilt can seem like heresy, particularly if we have been raised in a religious tradition that teaches themes of sin and guilt. Many people struggle to preserve their religious faith and their guilt at the same time, and in nearly equal proportions. This is highly impractical. Guilt takes up inner psychic space where faith could otherwise abide. Guilt and faith cannot have a peaceful coexistence. In the choice between guilt and faith lies the world’s fate, for faith can conquer all. Guilt will sit on its hands and not do a damn thing.
The key to releasing guilt is unbelievably simple, even if the process may be long and difficult. Ask for guilt to be taken away by a power greater than your own, the original creative intelligence that some of us call God. To ask for this divine favor it is not necessary to believe in God; it is only necessary to be willing to change. (Personally, I believe that a God powerful enough to have created the universe is a God who feels secure enough to help out disbelievers.) The tiniest kernel of a willingness to change is the first seed of faith — and the beginning of the end of guilt.
Ending the Inner War
To release guilt is not to fight or deny it. Most people cannot remain guilty for very long without fighting the feeling, and this incites an inner war. But it is only an inner surrender that brings about change. When guilt seems implacable and change impossible, it’s time to surrender to the obvious: we cannot release our guilt on our own. We must invite assistance from unseen powers.
Such assistance arrives on its own schedule, and through subtle means that may escape your notice at first. Someone may begin to treat you more mercifully than before, for instance, and at first you may not relate this change to your prayer for release from guilt. But it is my experience that divine assistance does eventually arrive, and whenever it is recognized it may be said that the existence of God is proved because God has delivered a change within ourselves that we did not know how to induce alone. When we have found the way to authentic change, we have found the way to a real God. God is a purpose, not a boss or judge.
Compassionate Self-Recognition
Guilt is seldom present without its unhappy partner, helplessness. If you are steeped in guilt, you will judge your present condition as unsatisfactory, yet believe that you are either unworthy or incapable of changing for the better.
The willingness to change begins with self-forgiveness — which is not a way of excusing one’s problems, but of recognizing them in a compassionate light. To recognize one’s flaws and failures mercifully is to acknowledge that we all come by who we are honestly (even if we have a flaw of dishonesty) because we are always trying to do what’s best for ourselves. We may be greatly misled by our self-interest, but it is always there, and within it lies the key to productive change.
Compassionate self-recognition allows us to see how we have been serving self-interest in a narrow, conflicted, or counterproductive way. Recognizing and forgiving our selfishness enables us to enlarge, extend, and refine our self-interest. As our self-interest matures, we increasingly find that it matches the interest of the whole human species — and then the interest of nature, of which our species is a part — and then the divine interest of the cosmos.
Guilt keeps us feeling small and lonesome. Com-passionate self-recognition, founded on forgiveness, lets us feel at home anywhere and everywhere.
Resisting the Popularity of Guilt
Make no mistake: To begin releasing your guilt is to go against the way of the world. Many people believe that releasing guilt means condoning errors and abdicating responsibility. But true responsibility in-spires a response, an act of change. Guilt points toward a problem while denigrating the abilities of everyone concerned to do anything about it.
To release guilt is not to say, “I didn’t do it!” and attempt to shift responsibility elsewhere. To release guilt is to say, “I have done the best I could, and I will try to change or improve to correct my flaws or failures.” To release guilt is to surrender our taste for self-punishment. This is revolutionary work, for the world runs on guilt and punishment.
To gauge the popularity of guilt, ask the people you know whether they believe in the effectiveness of punishment. Very few, if any, will answer that they find no use for it at all. What would become of the world, they may ask, without guilt and punishment?
The answer is that the world could become a place of faith and continuous learning. To test this vision, begin answering your own mistakes with an honest, open compassion and the willingness to learn. Never consider the struggle to change yourself a failure; consider it always a learning process whose duration and final outcome are unknown to you. Guilt will tell you that the battle to improve yourself is lost. Responsibility knows that the process of growth is always beginning.
As you learn to treat yourself with kindness, clarity, and responsibility, your own belief in guilt and punishment will subside. Resisting the popularity of guilt begins with casting your single vote for healing instead. It doesn’t matter that you will be outnumbered for a while, for you are casting your lot with a great power.
Releasing Guilty Secrets
Guilt thrives in secrecy. For many of us, whatever public shame we have suffered pales beside the intensity of private self-condemnation over certain secrets, large or small, that help define our personalities. The first step to releasing any guilty secret is to examine it honestly in a way that is new to most of us. Ask yourself: “How useful is this secret in achieving my ultimate goals in life?” or “What does this secret serve?”
A guilty secret cannot really be released until it is seen as useless to the pursuit of spiritual growth — and spiritual growth is understood to be the process that achieves all of one’s important goals. From this point of view, protecting a guilty secret is not “bad” so much as it is a waste of precious and limited time. At the heart of faith is just such a clear and simple practicality.
Of course, the release of profound secrets requires a profound vulnerability: a willingness to be seen for who you truly are, within and without. But I doubt that anyone can surrender all their secrets at once. Indeed, we must start surrendering some of our smaller secrets in order to discover or comprehend our larger secrets. By learning in small steps that the practice of openness and vulnerability leads to freedom, you can eventually develop enough faith to pursue the great freedom of profound vulnerability.
Guilt and Addiction
Although some addictions can entrap the body, they are not the body’s fault to begin with. The appetite behind them is the mind’s appetite, not the body’s, and it is primarily an appetite for guilt. We accept guilt as “natural,” and we seek a constant infusion of it to maintain our sense of the normal. What guilt creates is a false sense of stability — an internal condition akin to perpetual crisis management. This is the state of existence most of us are used to.
To constantly feed our minds with guilt, we must do something guilt-inducing. In terms of addiction, we may take something pleasant — for a mild example, let's use a chocolate chip cookie — and we use it as a means to create pain through the repetitive indulgence of remembered pleasure. That is, when we eat something that we remember as pleasurable — but for which we have no hunger — we set ourselves up for the pain of shame (“I have no control”), the pain of self-resentment (“I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that cookie”), and the pain of indigestion (“Bleah!”). I know this cycle well, and from my studies I recognize it as the same cycle behind more serious addictions. Serious addictions allow people less time to figure them out before irretrievable damage may be done.
At any rate, when pain and pleasure get mixed up in our minds they become useless as signals about how to use our bodies wisely in the world. Yet in the confusion of addiction, the mind is not a slave to the body, but a slave to itself. It’s the habitual desire for guilt that creates false appetites, and then those appetites get blamed on the poor unsuspecting body. When the body subsequently becomes habituated to particular substances or activities, its urges can seem to be leading us astray — when in fact the body has only done our guilty bidding.
The cure? A simple if challenging moment of awareness with the arising of every addictive urge. Confronting the chocolate chip cookie, cigarette, or drug that looks so good but is not needed, one can ask, “Am I serving my happiness and freedom with this indulgence, or my guilt and enslavement?” That may seem like a big question to ask about a small decision of the moment. But if a small decision is fraught with tension and suffering, then big questions need to be asked. (With profound addictions, medically-supervised withdrawal or recovery programs may be necessary before such a question can even be brought to one’s awareness.)
This conscious approach to addiction is not an argument against pleasure. Rather it is an argument for the choice of pure and unmitigated pleasure whenever possible, and the denial of pleasure contaminated by guilt. For the fact is that a “guilty pleasure” is no pleasure at all over the long term. It is another surrender to the mind’s circular trap of addiction to guilt.
A pure and unmitigated pleasure, by the way, will be some form of authentic service to self or others, or a form of worship. A pure and unmitigated pleasure may be tiny (a chocolate chip cookie enjoyed without guilt) or immense. An immense, pure, and unmitigated pleasure is one type of transcendental experience (see step IV).
Addiction and Forgiveness
We may sometimes realize that an indulgence serves only our guilt and enslavement, and then go ahead with it anyway. These failures to choose freedom must be accepted with as much awareness and forgiveness as we can muster. Forgiveness is the only quality that enables us to succeed after a thousand failures — and the only quality that enables us to grow a little even while we are failing. After all, we learn to accept peace and freedom in tiny increments, and sometimes take two and a half steps back for every three forward.
Rapid change may seem to happen in dramatic moments of crisis and surrender, but such “accelerated” change relies on a lot of preparation (whether we know we have been preparing for change or not). Then, dramatic change needs to be confirmed by months and years of testing, checking, and certifying that one’s way of living is really better than it used to be. This is the science of spiritual development.
The acceptance of the real and free self follows the release of guilt. As we gradually give up the chaos of guilt, we slowly find our footing upon the bedrock stability of fearless love. This stability is founded neither on the rigid denial of pleasure nor the slavish avoidance of pain, but on acceptance of both kinds of experience as the natural warp and weft of living in the body. It is in this stable state of mind that we can wisely use pain and pleasure as signals of which way to go and what to do in this world.
Accepting the Loss of Guilt
As an addiction or some other pattern of guilt begins to disintegrate, one may feel a distinct sense of loss. I’ve confronted this feeling a number of times: “Without this familiar habit, worry, or guilt, who will I be from now on?” As something fixed, heavy, and negative within the self dissolves, an unfamiliar sensation of openness, light, and permeability fills in. Such a change may bring about a feeling of queasiness, but that passes as one’s sense of self eventually restabilizes — with more energy, optimism, and flexibility than before.
Accepting the loss of guilt brings on a fundamental realization about the nature of the self. Everything false and heavy within us is tied to guilt; everything true and light is illuminated by faith. Our personalities are limited and deformed by our wounds and guilt. We may take great pride in some of our scars, even defending them to the death against a healing which would dissolve them. To release guilt is to surrender our limitations, and open ourselves to a creativity, generosity, and wisdom that before was unimaginable.
Paradoxically, we become truer to ourselves as we become less defined by our personalities. Along the way there will be many opportunities to mourn the passing of former selves, each of whom were limited by various pretensions and self-deceptions that are no more. It is all right to feel this grief, and proper to honor the person we were yesterday — the person who did the best that he or she could, and by so doing, eventually transcended an old guilt and brought more faith into the world.
Guilt vs. the New Moment
We are often so fixed on the past that we overlook the potential of the present. We have never known as much as we do right now; we have a new sum total of knowledge and capacities at every new moment. Thus we are capable of some degree of change at any time, capable of putting together everything we have experienced into a novel awareness of ourselves and the world around us. And we are capable of acting on our novel awareness in unprecedented ways, initiating the liberation of ourselves and others from the dull habits of the past.
Guilt recognizes none of this, and would rather have us believe that a greater darkness is always closing in upon us. The chains that bind us to the habits of the past are forged with guilt, and if we do not change it is because we still believe we are undeserving of the gifts of our own potential.
Darkness and Light
Guilt is darkness, faith is the light; where they coexist is a world of shadows, that is, our world. The body is shadow, the earth is shadow, all matter is shadow. The key to seeing through all of it is the release of guilt. This way the world gradually lightens, and our passage through it becomes less painful.
II
T r u s t
Gathering trust is necessary for faith to be more than a pretense or naive fantasy. Faith grows from daily acts and decisions of trust — islands of clarity, peacefulness, and responsibility in this world of chaos.
The capacity for trust rests chiefly on one’s own trustworthiness; it is far easier to find reasons to trust others when you have every reason to trust yourself. Thus, the key to gathering trust is one’s own commitment to truthfulness and personal honor, a commitment necessarily leavened with compassion for human frailty and forgiveness of the human tendency to fail.
Strengthening one’s own honor and truthfulness, in a world shot through with illusions and deceptions, is the first faith-building step that is tinged with transcendence. To be trustworthy is to go against the grain of a cynical culture, and some would say, against human nature itself. Thus, to extend trust from the foundation of personal honor is to foster a vision of a new human nature.