Personal Faith
By Nancy Slocum
When I first moved to Temecula from the Bay Area two years ago, I joined an anti-hate coalition called Together in Our Valley as a way of connecting with like-minded people. This organization was the genesis of the Southwest Riverside County Interfaith Council, a group of spiritual leaders and individuals of many different faiths who meet monthly to learn from our diversity, to embrace our unity, and to become a collective spiritual voice for human rights and justice in our community.
When I asked to join the Interfaith Council I was asked what faith I would be representing. The question caught me unawares, and I just sort of “popped-off” “personal faith,” since I have been unaffiliated for many years. Two years later, after having heard each member share about their faith at a monthly meeting, I found it daunting to stand before the group to share mine, because it is, well, personal!
Like many of us, I have been a “seeker” my whole life. My earliest memory is sitting on the elementary school yard contemplating the “voice” within me that I recognized as guidance from something greater than myself. In truth, I was sitting there at 10 years old, questioning why I didn’t listen and follow it!
I was raised in the Presbyterian Church, mostly just getting dropped off there by my parents. I spent hours talking with the minister, with all my “yeah, buts,” “how coulds,” “what ifs,” questioning all the contradictions I was hearing and seeing everywhere I looked in my small, provincial, and racist community. I remember looking up the word “hypocrisy” in the dictionary as a very young girl. In retrospect, I think I was trying to verify that “voice,” or that visceral experience that I was having and didn’t understand. I was trying to figure out what was “true,” and how that related to my personal freedom and purpose in life.
Then I went to Berkeley in the early sixties…! My first exposure, in my early 20’s, to “alternative” spirituality was J. Krishnamurti’s book, The First and Last Freedom. I remember it being about finding truth and, therefore, freedom, by investigating my own mind, my reactions and beliefs, and choosing anew in the present moment. I was thrilled beyond measure! I have been studying the world’s religions, philosophies and human consciousness, and (unabashedly) myself ever since!
At some point along the way, maybe 25 years ago or so, I had the revelation that I was praying for guidance, and then constantly negotiating with myself about what I wanted to do. I was hoping for a burning bush or a booming voice, rather than trusting that movement of my own heart as Divine Guidance. I made a decision at that time to live my life by allowing myself to be “led” by that inner urging, which I know now to be that same “voice” I’ve experienced my whole life.
The conscious choice to live from that decision soon made it clear to me that all my solutions are spiritual. Many teachers and disciplines, both religious and secular, have enlightened and assisted me in my quest, and continue to do so today. Most recently, I have been studying A Course in Miracles, and attending classes at the Course in Miracles Foundation in Temecula.
Another pivotal point for me was the first time the book, The Tao Te Ching came into my hands and I read Lao Tsu’s first parable, “The Tao that can be named is not the Eternal Tao.” I interpreted that to mean that what I can name (be outside of to observe or witness), I cannot also be One with, and therefore cannot be the Eternal Tao, or God. This verified my questioning all the way back to childhood, about how trying to fit my experience of an intimate connection to something larger than myself in with any particular doctrine, always seemed to move me away from “IT,” and reinforced the idea of duality or separation.
You can see why I found it challenging to try to articulate what I do believe in, what actually is my personal faith!So here’s what I’ve come up with, at this point in time, and with the caveat that I speak from deep inquiry and questions, and not from attachment to static beliefs:
I believe in what I choose to call God (as a way of talking about IT). I believe that God is Love, and that God is all there is, the only reality, or truth;
I believe that I (and all that I observe) exist as a projection of my mistaken belief that I, or anyone else, could ever be separate from, or other than, One with God;
I believe that these projections (above) are the source of all my striving, and my belief in (and, therefore experience of) guilt and sin and suffering;
I believe that working with my own experience, and my own mind, to undo my mistaken belief that I ever separated from God, is the source of all forgiveness, and compassion, and the revelation of God’s Love.
All of that being said, the paradoxes are not lost on me! This mind of mine names, and interprets, believes in, has “faith” in this, what comes off sounding like a “personal creed.” I see that the “I” doing so is basically ensnared by its own mistaken belief in itself as observer, separate from what cannot be named. The hunter gets captured by the game, to paraphrase a line from an old blues song!
This may well be the basic human conundrum -- a mistaken belief in our separation from God, versus a deep internal knowing that this life is a journey home to the Love that we never left. One of my favorite Rumi poems, Love Dogs, has the lines
“This longing you express is the return message.
The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.”
For me, that kind of says it all; that our very “seeking” is, itself, the memory of our Oneness. We are longing to fill our hearts, our souls, and our lives with our own true Self.
