“Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.”
~Rabindranath Tagore
When I first read this quote many years ago, I thought it was poignantly compelling. Of course, things were going fairly smoothly for me at the time, and in my limited life experience I didn’t have much of a need to rely on faith. Since then I’ve had the equivalent of a dysfunctional relationship with faith. There are times when I’ve clung to it unreasonably, times when faith might have more appropriately been named delusional thinking or a naive belief in magic. At other times I’ve felt strongly that any bird singing in the middle of the night is highly likely to become an endangered species. What better way to invite disaster than to hold fast to the unlikely claim that everything will be just peachy in the morning, steadfastly disregarding all evidence to the contrary?
What is faith really though? Informal definitions of faith range from the absence of worry, the opposite of anxiety, courage, a trust in a higher power, self-confidence, or, according to William Wordsworth, “ passionate intuition.” If you want to get dry and analytical about it, all of these things are really cognitive assumptions. It might not have much appeal to say “Have a positive assumption, everything will be okay,” but in essence, whether it’s trusting in a higher power, or in oneself or one’s own intuition, the idea of having faith focuses our attention on a belief in a positive outcome, which, simply put, calms our neural pathways and allows our minds to access our creative and logical problem solving thoughts, thus creating a much higher probability that the positive outcome we’re visualizing will actually come to pass.
Maybe it’s not so much what does happen in the presence of faith, as what happens in faith’s absence. Most of the people I meet tell me that when faith is missing, self-doubt is the imposter that takes its place. If faith is a positive assumption, self-doubt is the voice of doom. And this so-called voice is simply another thought, one that has no power until we endow it with strength by paying attention to it and following it right out of our present moment into a future that looks like the opposite of our dreams.
No wonder we get frustrated when well-meaning positive people say with a smile and a pat on the back “Have faith!” It isn’t easy to just change our thoughts. But it can happen. It starts with simply noticing. Maybe for one or two seconds a day we can let self-doubt pass us by and stay firmly rooted in the moment – even if the moment is not particularly pleasant. We can catch self-doubt in the act of being wrong. We can turn our attention to noticing small positive things that happen, and things that we are grateful for. Maybe that’s what it means to sing in the dark – to stand in the midst of the messy painful life we are in right now and focus on the slim streak of light, barely a hint on the horizon. Faith doesn’t mean we don’t notice we’re standing in the dark; it simply invites us to a different way of stating our intention, the intention to see deeply and know that every moment offers a new choice. Are we standing blind and hopeless in the dark? Or are we gathering the best and highest thoughts of ourselves in the breathless moment before the stage lights come up and the real story begins?
~ © 2007, Linda Firth
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©Linda Firth 2009