Skeptical optimism

Feels like faith to me!

I was raised by skeptical optimists. My brother and I were taught to stay curious and to question everything. Openness and criticality go hand in hand — try ideas on like clothing, test and form your own opinions. You can always change your mind.

This foundation has brought me into my own personal spirituality, in which I am neither gullible nor a full-blown cynic. I see meaning in everything, and also, we literally live on a giant spinning rock in the middle of the sky.

I did not go to church, but I did learn to believe that there is so much goodness in people, and that if we pay attention to what’s going right each day, the goodness will grow. I didn’t sit in mass on Sundays, but I did listen to my father’s dinner lectures about how we pour love into the people around us, that we overtip the waiters and make contact with the outcasts and the heretics. And, that we never litter.

Then I became anorexic because it was too tough to be my shiny self with all my big feelings and raging opinions in this smiling, bubble-wrapped society. I think many mental health disorders and addictions are born from a need to protect our sensitive, shining hearts.

We are little sponges as children, absorbing away all day long, and haven’t yet developed the skills of discernment. Religion has a lot of impressing power, and I think that going to church would have hindered more than supported my growth. Tremendously beautiful and valuable for many people, but simply not for my child self.

Feels like faith to me.

Sometimes I’m envious of the religious communities I witness; collective unity is so rad & magical. And, it reminds me that there is some thread of divinity within us all, that binds us more strongly than any sort of external identity.

Ultimately, to me, spirituality is about the relationship you have with god, with love, and how this relationship brings expansion and truth into your life. Ideally, it helps align you with the things and people that feel deep and right and true.

Finding my faith was a personal process that came through studying and experimenting with practices like yoga and meditation. These bring me into my body and closer to my spirit. As Michael Singer says, “spirituality begins when you decide you’ll never stop trying.” That you’ll never stop trusting — or trying to trust — that there is so much to be faithful in, and it’s worth it to look.

Faith, to me, is trusting in the relentless resiliency of the human body, mind, and spirit. It is reflecting on what used to be difficult and now is more easeful. It is reminding myself that I’ve done hard things before and I will again and again. My faith has grown by moving through the most excruciating moments, the deepest grief and pain — and also through experiencing joy, peace, and freedom.

If it brings you closer to the place that is pure loving awareness within you — that’s faith.

There is a place that you can always rely on within you, to be true and real and right, and once you find that — that’s your faith. Because as Glennon Doyle tells us always, it doesn’t matter what you call God, it matters that you call it.

Wherever you find your faith, may that place be blessed. 

I have faith in my body, in love, and in the spirit of humanity. I have faith in the earth and her cyclical regeneration, I have faith in the sun and the moon and the stars. I have faith that if we continue to dream up fresh and beautiful ways of being, we will continue to evolve the collective heart of humanity, of all that moves and breathes in this world.

xx, maggie 

Rising, risen, rising indeed!