by Pinky Jangra | August, 2019 | Faith
Imagine a life full of hope, peace, freedom, acceptance, patience, courage and optimism, versus a life of doubt, agitation, restriction, blame, urgency, fear and worry. Though we’ll all experience the latter to some degree, only faith brings the former into my life. What is faith? The dictionary definition of faith is ‘complete trust or confidence in someone or something’. So, it could be about having faith in yourself, in those closest to you or even in strangers. More commonly, it’s associated with faith in God (whether in the religious sense or not), in Grace, Divinity, in the universe, the soul, the spirit and in life itself. Funnily enough, the more abstract, non-physical and non-provable constructs are actually the ones I find it easiest to have faith in! I struggle most to have faith in myself. I’m pretty good at having faith in other people – sometimes I have too much of this and can be left disappointed! But somehow, I find myself having a very strong faith in something that I don’t even know for sure exists. I have faith in what I call a non-religious God, or Grace, or ‘the divine architecture of life’. It’s the thing that created everything, including me. It’s within me, too. “Faith is the being able to cleave to a power of goodness appealing to our higher and real self, not to our lower and apparent self.” (Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 1873). It is this type of faith that brings most peace, hope and gratitude into my life. How do we cultivate faith? I can’t think of a specific time, place or...
