Keeping the Faith

Like right now.

It reminds me that there’s so much information I’m not privy to. Sacred information. The kind of information that gives meaning somehow to the hardest of human experiences. Like tragedy. And death. Pain and suffering.

There must be Divine perfection here. I know this to be true. I don’t know how I know. I just know. Call it blind trust.

I call it faith.

And yet we are living this human experience, too. Isn’t that the point of being alive?

To be in it and also above it at the exact same time.

To bear witness and to be present to suffering. Both our own and other’s.  To intimately know the darkness. And to sit beside those in our most important relationships when anguish arrives.

And in that very same space, to know infinite light. To know Grace. To understand there are higher truths- even though we can’t possibly know them all within the confines of a limited human brain. And to trust anyway.

At this most unprecedented time in the history of humanity, let us be both. We can become deeply present to our own and each other’s fear and pain. We can validate the discomfort of our current reality. We can process the profound individual and collective grief in solitude and in solidarity.

Together, we grieve the souls that have left their unforgettable mark on the world. We feel the despair of those left behind and for what is yet to come.

And as we embrace our humanity, let us also know faith. For what if these souls that have left us have bigger work to do? Could they have been tasked with the ushering in of a positive shift we have yet to witness or understand?

How might these hardships show us a better way forward?  How has this sacred pause encouraged us to see ourselves more clearly?  How might these hardships show us our own power to solve our most pressing global, community and family challenges, and show us our resilience, our strength and our compassion for one another?

Let us trust with hope and optimism that when this monumental moment passes, whenever that may be, there will be beauty and opportunity on the other side. There will be a rebuilding of sorts. We’ll still be human. Still imperfect. Still opinionated and sometimes in contrast to one another.

But our human race will have the luminous wisdom of a collective experience.

We have been brought to our knees.

And when we inevitably rise up, we can know a love and gratitude at a depth we have not known, that we could not have ever known before.

We really are that powerful.