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maybe faith is overrated




Sometimes it kind of surprises people that I don't have much faith, or that I don't believe in God, with all the spirituality I chase, the books I read, the help I may be able to give them. They think I must have some great understanding of a personalized, helpful God who is awesome and fills my heart with love and light.

Love and light, there's another thing I have no time for.

My spirituality is very earthly; if I am to agree that there is a God, it is primarily a creative wave of self-expressed realizations coming into being and then passing out of being again. It ain't about to whisk into my life and lay down some divine tracks to live by. My spirituality is hard won, emptyish, a puzzle I can't quite crack.

This may be the fault of the first act alison; too many years in the memory bank, too many times seeing spirituality organized and corrupting itself as it heads away from the earth and towards the grasping human heart. We don't even need to see past these last 40 years to find examples.




Or it may be the fault of my personality birthed through my upbringing; steering towards negativity as a way to claim safety. Either way, faith makes no sense to me when you apply it towards spirituality. It's puzzling emptiness is emergent from where I stand in the world. I am sure there are others just like me, who get faith in terms of everydayness (e.g. breathing, loyalty) but who can't reconcile faith with a God. There are just too many bad results to claim faith in what's happening as the absolute best outcome a God could produce.

So, don't let it surprise you that I'm not very faith-filled. See my quest to read spiritual new-age mumbo-jumbo as a way to line up my own felt-sense of the world with others. Don't wish me love and light and think I won't question your reliance on it. And know it's quite okay to feel this empty when it comes to spirituality.

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