Of Faith and Doubt

When we ask,

"Why am I?"

"What should I be and become?"

"What is the meaning of my life?" --

then we are exploring...

the region of our experience

where God may be known.

~ Gilkey

Diminished

Omitting God

leaves man on top

but of a diminishing

universe.

~Frank Shehd, Theology and Sanity

The more earnestly a man

seeks for certainty,

the more uncertain he becomes;

the more strenuously

he tries to remove all doubt,

the more doubt he experiences

~John S. Dunne, A Search for God in Time & Memory

Doubt is a pain

too lonely to know

that faith

is his twin brother.

~Kahlil Gibran

I have faith enough

to doubt and still believe.

~Joni Erickson Tada

Wanting to Know God

Wanting to know God is the road that leads to God, and it is an easy road to travel. God will come to meet you everywhere, He will appear to you everywhere, at times and places when you don't expect it, while you are awake and while you are asleep, while you are traveling and while you are at home, while you are speaking and while you are silent; for there is nothing in which God does not exist. And don't think that God is invisible. Who is more evident than God? That is why he made all things, so that through all things you can see him.

3rd Century Hermetic Writings

Remembering the Questions

Remembering the Questions - excerpts from Rilke

I want to beg you as much as I can to be patient toward all that's unsolved in your heart and learn to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms. Or like books that are written in a foreign tongue.

Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Concentration, attention, and intelligence are friends of the soul, but kindness, forgiveness, and generosity are the soul itself.

When everything is experienced as part of our eternal soul's journey, we can relax. We can let go into the perfection of God's plan for us. Practice leaning on God. Practice being full of faith.

Musings of Grace

Remind yourself of who you really are:

A part of forever unseparate from the whole, of the divine reality.

From "This Timeless Moment" by Laura Archera Huxley

From my mother's notes, dated August 2009 ~

*******

I keep asking myself what I ought to do in the immediate future - the probably not very long future that is left me. How to be more loving, more aware, more useful or (if that isn't possible) more content and accepting. So far the answer hasn't come but perhaps it will.

*******

You must all forgive me for being so burdensome. I haven't yet learned to accept the fact of not feeling very well, of being mentally and physically diminished. Please be patient with me and remember that underneath the sense of being lost, I love all of you very much.

*******

I know what I am - a human
But not who.
I know who God is
But not what.

*******

I have always as far back as I can remember been able to be totally immersed in whatever I was doing at the moment. I have always considered it a grace and a blessing that I was born with, not something I learned or earned. This extended to seeing each person for what is inside of them past their clothes, hair and externals after a breath or pause. Is this perhaps what makes other persons see me as a perceptive, welcoming, present for them even when I often don't listen well?

Doors of Perception

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is,

Infinite.

William Blake

Light and Grace Offered to All

I rather feel that all men will be saved. It is at least possible that in the interval between life and death, before one steps into eternity, such light and grace may be given a man as to enable him to reject all evil, turn to God and goodness. I am particularly encouraged so to think in the face of so much suffering on the part of the innocent, the children.

Matthew Kelty, “Flute Solo”

If There Be Sorrow

If there be sorrow
let it be for things undone
undreamed
unrealized
unattained,
to these add one:
love withheld
restrained.

Mari Evans

Whatever Is, Is Right

From Alexander Pope’s Essay On Man

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in th’ ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives all through life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
Submit.-- In this or in any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear;
Safe in the had of one disposing Power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which though canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

More Than All of These

More Than All of These

The garden is the rustle of unseen things,
The silent flutter of butterflies’ wings:

It’s a place of still, enchanted hours,
Of fragrance, peace, unfolding flowers
And the drowsy sound of humming bees.
Yet a garden is more than all of these…

For here we find that
God is walking,
Here in a garden

Talking sublimely without any words
In the murmur of trees and the song of birds.


Elizabeth Reeves Humphreys