Saturday, May 10 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico
It's 2 pm. I'm sitting at my table in The Village at Eldorado shops just outside Santa Fe, exchanging sadly sympathetic glances with my fellow authors and publishers at this day-before-Mother's Day book fair, wondering, as are they, why I'm here.
Billed as a great opportunity to sell books to last-minute gift-givers, this event has been a bust, with few browsers and even fewer buyers.
Although the fair ends in an hour, I'm already starting to pack up. I'm not the only one.
I mutter under my breath as I refill my boxes and bins and load the car. After a week of financial setbacks, I had hoped for a breakthrough day. It's not even a break-even day.
A few hours and several errands later, I'm back on the freeway, heading home and still decidedly cranky. Then I see it: a sign for Santa Fe.
I don't believe in tests and I avoid describing any aspect of my experience here on earth as a "school." Tests can be failed and schools can be filled with bullies. For me (most days), there are no failing grades and no one trying to trip me up. I prefer, instead, to see life as a series of portals and initiations, each leading to higher levels of awareness and consciousness.
I realize as I see the highway sign that it's no accident that this particular initiation has taken place for me in Santa Fe, a city whose name translates as "holy faith."
My journey through this lifetime has largely been about trust -- trust that I'm on the right path...trust that my inner guidance is authentic...trust that, as I write, the next word will come...trust that as I surrender more completely to the highest imperative, I'm always taken care of.
Yet, each time I reach a plateau of trust, it doesn't take long before I'm thrust into a situation that calls on me on to trust more fully still.
That renewed call to trust always comes just as I'm about to step up into a new level of mastery and empowerment. And it nearly always challenges me to transcend my fear and continue to live a life wholly in faith.
In my novel, The MoonQuest, such a mirror for my own journey of trust, the main characters are reminded at a moment of great risk that there is no partial trust. "You either trust or you do not. There is no halfway in between," they're told.
I, too, need that message repeated. Frequently.
I, too, need to be reminded that each call to trust is a divine call, a call to deepen my faith in the power, passion and potential that is the Divine living in, as and through me.
I, too, need to remember the holy faith that guides, supports and prospers me. Always.
On a side note -- and in another reminder of the spirals of life that continue to carry us to higher levels of mastery -- I just discovered that I wrote the blog post titled Holy Faith I a year ago, almost to the day...also in Santa Fe.
Art by Mark David Gerson: #77 The Cathedral of St. Francis, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Holy Faith II
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6 comments:
I joke with you that in the world of divine guidance, I am definitely in the remedial class. I am coming to realize that in certain things, just a few things, but so critical, perhaps the most essential of things, for me, I do not trust, I think I know best, and I struggle and fight to hold things together even as they unravel in my hands so unrecognizable that I'm not even sure what I"m holding onto anymore.
This past year and a half and counting, at least, and I'm beginning to think most of my life, has been a call to trust and my own deep fear the divine won't provide. No wonder I need to learn this lesson over and over, each time spiraling deeper and deeper toward the one issue, my greatest fear. And now I'm being asked to let go, to have holy faith that I will be supported and that I will prosper, always.
Thank you my friend. Thank you.
In watching Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You tonight, many things struck me, not least of which was the simple faith that Grandpa Vanderhof, the family's patriarch (played by Lionel Barrymore) displays in God and the goodness of humankind, a faith that is the hallmark of all Capra films.
Vanderhof, as written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, knows instinctively that he and his family are always taken care of. And so, of course, they always are.
In a final scene that mirrors an early one, Vanderhof says grace before dinner:
"Well, Sir, here we are again. ... Anyway, everything's tuned out fine, as it usually does. ... We've all got our health, and as far as anything else is concerned, we still leave that up to You. ..."
That's all we're asked to do. Ever.
Whatever higher power we believe in and whatever we call it, that higher power not only resides in us but is us. And all it asks of us (and it feels like a might big "all" some days) is that we surrender our will to it...in holy faith.
It's a faith that has never let me down, despite my worries and anxieties, despite my doubts and tantrums. Despite my fear.
Stepping out on faith has always been a inner battle for me. Now it's funny that I said "inner battle", when in reality it is my battle. I own it so therefore I have the right to let it go, since it does belong to me.
Easier said than done though. Sometimes it feels like I am playing the lottery...hoping to win. Well if that's the case, I won't ever win if I don't play.
I beleive that your goal, my goal and everyone else's goal can be attained if we keep believing in ourselves. Keep looking deep inside your heart, believe in yourself and remember that I believe in you, too.
Thank you Mark David
I am all choked up! Hugs for everyone!
Love Teresa
I have been watching "The law of Attraction in Action" (The Teacings of Abraham), and it is boot camp on how to get what we want. I just wish to share this: it is changing my life radically. I did what they suggested as a child, and got everything I wanted. A good number of things lately have manifested EXACTLY as I've wanted them and been wonderful because I've had such complete positive faith in the fact that I HAVE RECEIVED THEM IN THE FUTURE ALREADY IN A GOOD WAY SO I DON'T WORRY AT ALL EVEN WHEN I'M TERRIFIED.
BTW, my guardian angel's name is Theresa. *grin*
Brightest blessings, Mark David, and hugs,
Suze
Dear Suze,
Thanks for your comment.
While I fully agree with the Abraham/Law of Attraction teachings, I tend to go a step farther.
I believe that my human self (the "self" the Law of Attraction counsels to ask for what it wants) has only a limited view of the infinite potential available to me. And so while I, in my human guise, certainly pursue my desires in line with the Law of Attraction, I also surrender to the superior wisdom and farsightedness of my higher self/god self. In other words, I say "thy will, not mine," in the knowingness and certainty that that higher power (which is not separate from me, but is me) has the fuller and longer view of my highest good and access to the most elegant fulfillment of all my desires, not just the ones I'm consciously aware of.
If, through my life, I had focused all my energy only on those desires and passions accessible to my human/personality self, I would have missed out on many of the joys, pleasure and successes I have enjoyed over the years. For example, there would be no MoonQuest, a book I had no conscious desire to write, and I would not be writing this to you from Albuquerque, a city that had no place in my mind's roster of desirable places to live.
Our conscious desires are fenced in by our fears, by our conditioning and even by our imagination, itself fenced in by our experiences. But when we allow ourselves to soar beyond our conscious desires and into the realm of the invisible and consciously unknowable, we discover those higher passions we could never have imagined from the limited purview of our personality selves and find ourselves fulfilled in ways not previously imaginable
Blessings, always,
Mark David
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