“This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.” (Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, p. 264.)
Faith is a very free-spirited thing; it is a breathing, laughing, and crying kind of thing. I love that Williams begins that list of what a living faith might be with “to question” and ends it with “seek.”
Belief, the personal truth that cannot be supported by fact or logic, holds its own power. It is a thing that exists.
Faith, though, is the complete trust and confidence in something or someone. Faith is a relationship to belief that is about what is out there that we know cannot be proven. Faith is a conviction rather than a belief, although intimately connected to belief. It is the firm holding of a belief. It is not the thing; it is the relationship to it. We could list any number of things we believe in, but the greater meaning in that is in addition to what we believe and have faith in.
I believe I have a living faith--a breathing, celebrating and, sometimes, challenging relationship to life.
Blessed be.
Lady Cynthia