Faith. Or Fear

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

When the American President Franklin D Roosevelt uttered these words amid the Great Depression in 1933, there was plenty to fear, and I am quite sure that his words were not heeded by all. But they were heard by enough people to make a difference. Sadly, today, we have forgotten his advice. Instead, we live in an age of half-truths, mis-truths and un-truths.

Fear is now rife in our world. Even so-called sensible people are infected by it (which perhaps suggests they were not that sensible in the first place). Fear of catching the Rona, fear of getting the jab, of not getting the jab, of the jabbed, of the unjabbed, of the consequences of doing this, saying that or hearing the other. Fear is one nil up and the game seems like it is in the closing minutes.

In these crazy times many are trying to identify the culprits behind this Regime of Fear. But just as the fish does not know that it swims in water, many of those who are pointing the finger are themselves operating from a heightened state of fear. At this rate the fearful are going to follow the fearful over the cliff…

It is easy to claim, as many do, that the antidote to fear is love. But, there are many types of love, some of which, through attachment and entitlement, land up feeding fear. Love, like so many topics popularised by the New Age, means different things to different people. Love, therefore, is not the answer to this problem. What we need is Faith.

But what do I mean by Faith?

Now, I appreciate that the word Faith, with its associations to the Christian church, is difficult for some. But I am interested in a Faith that predates the organisation of religion, a Faith that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Church. The Church is, in some senses, the very last place you are likely to find God. I am talking about a Faith of personal connection…

But connection to what, or to whom? What should we place our faith in?

Can we place our faith in other people? Well, I would not advise it, simply because people’s good intentions are not enough, and in many cases make bad situations worse. We are all flawed, and when left to our own devices we can make really bad choices.

So, can we place our faith in government? It is only fear that makes people believe that the government is their friend, even though year in year out we see examples of governments acting maliciously against their own people. But this does not happen because it is a Tory government or a Democrat government, but because it is a Government government! People might prefer one type of coercion and control over another, but Right or Left, it is still coercion and control. Both Boris Johnson and Joe Biden are living proof that it does not matter who you vote for (or even whether you vote at all), the government always gets in. It may be the case that government becomes more efficient when power is devolved down to the local level, and that some public servants act with good intentions, but the business of politics is washed through with money, politicians are themselves in debt to special interests who fund their campaigns, and institutions and bureaucracies first priority is always to protect themselves. The only good government is self-government. Start Your Own Country! I am not even joking.

What about science? Surely, we can put our faith in that? Except that science, like government, is biddable. Scientists need to be funded, and funds are only available to those scientists whose research aligns with the prevailing power agenda. Science is, in all but the rarest of exceptions, and regardless of the intentions of scientists, $cience. And $cience hates Faith.

Government and $cience are two methods by which some humans can pursue their favourite pastime, Playing God, where they pump up the power of their Mind beyond its limits. This worship of the Mind lays behind our society’s obsession with education, education, education. Except that no matter how many times you say the word, education alone will never be enough. The essential next step on from education is transformation, when the student takes what they have learned and uses it to create inner (not outer) change. This inner change, this personal transformation requires a Leap of Faith, a humbling admission that you do not know all the answers and that without God you have no way of finding them. This may be contrasted with a lack of Faith, an arrogant reliance on ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’, which is born of a deep-seated fear of being wrong.

By declaring Faith in a force bigger than us - God - we concede our inferior position in the world, which then restores us to our rightful place in the natural order, creating the conditions for positive growth. This non-Christian kind of Faith has nothing to do with belief, data, information or evidence. It is therefore the enemy of all those who consider themselves advanced, sophisticated, cultured or intelligent. Faith is a full-hearted declaration that however smart you think you are, you are in fact not nearly smart enough. Faith enables us to see that humanity is not that advanced, in evolutionary terms barely out of the caves, and certainly not clever enough to be manipulating deadly diseases in a lab and expecting nothing to go wrong. Admitting that we do not know, and that without God we cannot know, is the only way to actually know.

But to be clear, Faith is not belief. Belief is a product of the Mind and of the Feelings, for it is always based on something. I believe this, or I believe them, because of this or that. Faith leans on nothing.

The journey from doubt, through belief and onwards to Faith is otherwise called spiritual development, a movement away from obsessing about how we feel, what we look like or what we think, toward God. Faith requires us to accept that we are not enough, need guidance, and that without it we are utterly lost. But this requires a humbling of the self that is beyond the reach of many people in this current Age. Faith is irrational and illogical, foolish even, but that is precisely its strength, for not everything in life can be ordered, categorised, processed or managed. Faith is needed because without God, humanity will, through the engines of ‘progress’ and ‘science’ destroy itself. The Tarot assists us greatly here. We all have the capacity to be as card zero, the Fool. Some will think this a crazy, insane, absurd kind of foolishness and will refuse to even try to understand it. But the Fool knows otherwise, because they are guided by God.

The final clincher is that Faith is not merely an action but an alchemical process. It connects us with a power source that can heal, guide, support and protect us. A source that helps us to keep going, to get back up again after a fall, to learn, to move forward and to live our life as we see fit, distant from the busy-bodying voices who claim to know what is best for us. Faith is not an abandonment of Mind or a fall into ignorance. It is a movement beyond the Mind, which enables us to appreciate things that the Mind would otherwise hold away from us or distort. When applied correctly it is the root of all miracles, makes the impossible possible and ultimately it may be the only thing that gets our world back on track.

I say a great deal more about Faith (and its siblings Hope and Charity) in Soul Strong Volume One, but in the meantime, if you want to be free of fear, then you have to take back authority over your own life. You have not got to watch the news, still less believe it. You could instead do as the great spiritual teacher George Michael suggested, and proclaim that “I Gotta Have Faith.”

 Photo by Victor Rodriguez on Unsplash