Deep grief can be felt like a specific location in your body, your life, a coordinate on a map of time. When a ravishing event occurs in life and you are hurt beyond hurt, grieve is here. And the odd thing, you know exactly who you were before and after this grieve occurred. When you are standing in your darkest night, that dark night of the soul, that forest of sorrow, you just cannot imagine that you can or will ever find your way to a better place again. Ever feel happiness again.
But if someone shows up who can assure you that, after they themselves have stood in that same place you are in now, and have somehow, through a miraculous act of grace, gotten out of that dark night of the soul, and, again miraculously, have moved on, sometimes this will bring you just that tiny spark of so much needed hope you so desperately need.
It may just be enough to get you to make a leap of faith.
There’s a reason we refer to leaps of faith, because the decision to consent to any notion of divine being, or a higher self, is a rather large jump into the unknown zone. And I know faith isn’t rational at all because if faith were rational, it wouldn’t be called faith, by definition. Faith is described as a strong belief in something, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof. Do therefore faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch.
Faith brings you to ‘sticking your head in the tiger’s mouth’. Taking a step into the dark without knowing you’ll fall or fly. If we truly knew all the answers to life in advance, as to the meaning of life and the nature of God, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity, it would just be, not even an experience but yet another so called ‘tile wisdom’.
At some point, the invitation, for you, for us, is to stop, open into what is here and allow the silence in. Stop, become still, open yourself and let yourself be amazed or be wondered. And in the stillness, right than and there, you can find your own. We often don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, a supreme self does exist, your self who is eternally at peace. Your self that knows where to go and what to do and how to deal with what life throws at you. And there is a reason they call that part of you a God presence, because God is right here, right now, always.
The only place to find the God self is in the now, and now is the only time. They say the wound is where the light of God gets in so healing can occur.
We search for happiness everywhere, and tend to forget that that treasure is within us already, in fact has been there all the time.
But to claim it, you must stop the commotion of the mind, if only for just a moment, abandon the desires of the ego, if only just a moment, and enter into the silence of your heart.
Rumi said: “There is a force within that gives you life—Seek that. In your body there lies a priceless jewel—Seek that. Oh, Wandering Sufi, if you are in search of the greatest treasure, don’t look outside, Look within, and Seek That”.
And there is nothing, no thing, as not believing in God; you just stand upon a cliff, about to fall into your own despair and there is no such thing as not believing in God. We all call upon God, upon faith in our darkest hour, the dark night of the soul, the depth of our despair.
As the sun illuminates the moon and the stars, so let us illuminate one another. Keep the faith.