This week I’d like to share with you my own edited version of a talk originally written and given by Robert Fritz, a highly renowned American Thinker.
I am sure you will gain much from it. Sometimes we think we have to be regularly in touch with the Divine to have a meaningful Life – this puts a dramatically different slant on that attitude.
It should take just 3 minutes to read……please try to find the time to read it.
A book entitled Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday) contains letters between Mother Theresa and her confessors and superiors over a sixty-six year period. Most of the letters reveal a woman who could not feel the presence of God, even while she labored in his name.
She did have a pronounced mystical experience in which she felt an immediate connection from a higher power. Moreover she was directed to leave her current situation and begin her ministry, which she did, single handedly, in the poorest districts in Calcutta. The community she started was dedicated to relieving the suffering of the most neglected people, most of whom were dying of TB, or starvation, or other deadly conditions. Her work continued, gathering strength, followers, and fame, and led to her being awarded The Nobel Peace Prize.
Throughout most of that time, her inner experience was that of abandonment from any spiritual confirmation. Her prayers were not answered by revelation, experiences, or proof of a higher power.
And yet, her work went on, serving some of the least advantaged people on the face of the earth.
The great mysteries are the great mysteries, beyond the understanding of humanity.
This is as true for science as it is for religion, metaphysics, philosophy, and psychology.
We can’t know what we are incapable of knowing.
We can’t understand what we have no capacity to comprehend.
Yet, it is human to attempt to explain the unexplainable.
Humanity has little wisdom when it comes to its insatiable appetite to explain the great mysteries with doctrines of certainties, be it from dogmatic believers to dogmatic unbelievers.
How can we say for sure that our various beliefs reflect the ultimate and absolute Truth?
Therefore, how can belief be the basis of anything?
While we construct elaborate belief systems, argue about them, fight wars over them, attempt to convert people to them, build our identities over them, live our lives by them, the mysteries remain mysteries.
Here are all the possibilities:
God exists and we know it.
God exists and we don’t know it.
God doesn’t exist and we know it.
God doesn’t exist and we don’t know it.
Yet, an insight that is beyond belief is this observation:
If God exists, God knows it.
There are two types of faith. One type, the most common version, is the adoption of a belief system, and the insistence that what you believe is true.
Here faith is the act of investing commitment to a belief that can’t be proven.
The quest for certainty surely must follow.
Anything that seems to confirm the belief is welcomed and even sought.
But a faith that wants proof must stand on a shaking platform.
Remember, we are talking about any belief system that demands faith, which includes those who insist that God is nothing more than a manmade invention.
They are looking for proof as much as the devotee to one or another religious dogma.
The other type of faith does not seek answers to the great mysteries.
Rather it is a suspension of the question.
To not seek an answer to the great mysteries puts one in a unique position: that of organizing one’s life around something other than belief.
Consider the way Mother Teresa organized her life, not around her beliefs, as evidenced by her doubts, but around her values. While she began her ministry around her mystical experience, she was able to continue her work, as difficult as it was, around her desire to relieve the burden of the intense suffering of those she served, even while failing to receive the confirmation of the belief system she was dedicated to.
Some may say she was living a lie.
I don’t think anyone can live a lie that takes so much dedication, hard work, pain and suffering, leadership, fortitude, and spirit for sixty-six years.
Rather, I think it takes something more sturdy than belief: aspiration, goodness, greatness, imagination, integrity, and dedication to others.
One can feel the ironic sadness of Mother Teresa’s quest to feel the presence of God, and yet, her inability to experience that direct confirmation of her longing.
But in the end, how little it mattered.
Some things, often the greatest, are well beyond belief.
visit : www.robertfritz.com for further information about Robert Fritz
Love and blessings,
Les