Faith
Question: I believe in God but I feel so detached from him -- I don't know spiritual love. I have no feelings for God one way or the other. Can you please tell me what it takes to come to truly love God?
Answer: Think about this for a moment, and it will help you through this trial. Could one feel the absence of something that he knows nothing about? God works in the soul in mysterious ways. And one of them is to create a great sense of His absence so that we are made to think -- to long for His Life -- through an emptiness we cannot explain to ourselves. All is well. Persist with your wish to know the truth and the Love you seek will find you.
(Correspondence, 2006)
Question: Is the idea that the Truth knows "all is well" simply a matter of faith, or are there facts to support it?
Answer: There are facts supporting the Truth's statement that all is well, but it takes "eyes that can see" them. We live in a perfectly ordered universe, a system of infallible balance. To be able to see this invisible world, with all of its perfect workings, ensures for anyone who can see it that not only is all well, but that there is no essential need for fear. The more we are able to inwardly perceive this orderly universe, the greater our ability is to let go of ourselves and allow the Intelligence that created this order to do what it has been secretly doing all along, which is to invite us to take part in it. Our work is about seeing the truth of all this and allowing our discoveries to guide us to the higher destination of which they hint.
Excerpted from Seeker's Guide to Self-Freedom
Question: I have been a Christian almost all my life. A few years ago I had to have open-heart surgery, which caused a stroke, messing up my ability to do my job. I ended up losing a job that I was good at and enjoyed thoroughly. I feel like Job in the Bible in that I have lost everything because the thing I did best was taken away from me. I have always heard that when God closes one door He opens another. I find myself getting down and not knowing which way to turn. I try to keep my faith, but I feel I am losing. I try to live in the present moment, but find that it is getting harder to do.
Answer: God never forsakes the soul that loves Him… never. The problem is, our souls (as they presently are) lack spiritual understanding. We think we are who we think we are, and these thought-constructed natures -- these images we hold of ourselves -- are in a form of enmity with God. For these reasons, when God gives Himself to us, we often don't understand the gift. Take Job, for instance. His trials and willingness to endure them, in spite of everything, did not confuse his love for the Almighty. Why? Because he knew in his heart that God is good. Sure, His tests may be tough, but for whatever reasons, God only gives tough tests to those whom He needs to be tougher.
Excerpted from Seeker's Guide to Self-Freedom
Question: The mistakes I've made in the past (and continue to make despite my efforts to wake up!) seem to mock the possibility of any hope I might have of ever actually transcending my lower nature. Are there just some people who aren't capable of realizing their soul-potential through faith, and that all will not eventually come right within their lifetime despite their best efforts?
Answer: We should never measure ourselves according to what we think our possibilities are -- as all such estimations are always limited conclusions reached by a self that secretly evaluates it own past in order to measure what may be its future; rather we ought to have faith in the "impossible," as the soul is created to transcend itself and all that went before and into its earthly birth!
Just as the achievement of a Higher state of itself is built right into the physical body that is properly exercised, whereby it becomes stronger for what it is made to do, so too does there exist an invisible system of spiritual success built into the willing soul; only in the subtler realms of spiritual works true success of the soul is realized by the conscious abandonment of the self that would succeed according to its own will.
The mastery of anything, including ourselves, begins with the faith that we are not here on earth to be perfected according to an image we hold of ourselves, but rather to allow Perfection to work its way upon us... So that only the awareness of something Greater than ourselves can draw us into a Greatness beyond ourselves, if we will it so.
True faith, as it concerns the success of the soul, is born of a Love that doesn't just "hope in things unseen," but that sees the potential of its fulfillment before its time, and then acts as though it already is.
Until one understands the true purpose of his life on this earth, he cannot hope to know the true meaning of success of the soul.
From Success of the Soul
