While I was thinking of what to write next, I kept thinking that there was more to be said about Faith. Just to recap quickly:
Step 1: We must be a good person, Obey commandments. Be willing to treat others as well or better than ourselves, especially those who we might count as an enemy. Be focused on righteousness not religiousness. Be disciplined in diet and personal habits. We can’t let the body rule us.
Step 2: Contact the divine. ‘Divine’ because it doesn’t matter our preconceptions of the heavens. We mustn’t give up. Include attempts at the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Let the focus on contact grow and expand over time. Don’t expect God the first time though. Far more likely it will be our attending angel.
Step 3: Contact doesn’t signify trust. (Faith) Ask for a chance to develop trust. It may come as a prediction (as it did for me), instructions to do something simple for reasons we don’t understand, or spiritual exercises of some kind. We won’t be asked to sacrifice our first-born. Some have thought so. Why am I so sure? Because real faith takes a lot of time to grow. (Who have you ever met and had complete and instant trust? Same goes for trust within God)
Abraham wasn’t asked to make that sacrifice until he was well over a hundred and had had many previous faith-based experiences.
Step 4: Gifts of the Spirit will come. They always do. But they will be tailored to our needs and abilities as we grow. Some have come to me in such abundance that I asked to have them stopped. Others I experienced only once or twice just to help me understand them. But as Ramakrishna said: Don’t let them distract you from the final goal: God’s presence.
Warnings: There are pitfalls on the road to Faith. Some experiences will lift us so high we might think we would never do wrong again. It’s easy to take pride in our spiritual experiences which causes heart-breaking pain to follow the spiritual highs. It’s like learning to ride a bike: when you fall off and skin your knee, cry and nurse it a bit. Then get back on and try again. After awhile we all find our spiritual balance and learn to negotiate the curves and bumps in our path.
One misperception: We all want to be good. Christ told us to be perfect. So, many of us try for that ideal. But weakness is given us by God. God created us. It’s His place to continue creating us. Don’t try to usurp His role in our growth. Perfection is always gift of God’s grace, never an achievement of one’s own efforts. It’s delightful to experience perfection even for a short time. Ask for it. I experienced it for about 3 days once. (Led by the Light, Chapter 6) But pride ruined it. Still each experience teaches us more.
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