Faith and the Path by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Discords are somehow part of a greater harmony and make the harmony more interesting, complex, and beautiful.

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The Courage to Let Go

It’s a tremendous thing that every time we venture out, we find more and more complex order.  When we investigate that complexity – in biology or in chemistry or even in psychology – we find that it is a structured complexity.  It is harmony.  It is something like music, which includes discords, but the discords are somehow part of a greater harmony and make the harmony more interesting, complex, and beautiful.

Every time we look out, we find order.  And then comes the moment when something new is thrown at us.  For instance, in science, new findings.  Or in life, new experiences.  They suddenly seem to shatter the order we have established, to put the order we are familiar with into crisis.  And then comes the point where all spiritual life begins, where you begin to move on the path or not.  That’s the moment of decision.  Because that is the moment where either we hang on for dear life (which is death) to that order we have already found, or we let go in the courageous trust that we will find a greater order.  And that letting go is possible only through faith.  That is what faith is: the courage to let go.

We practice that from the beginning in our spiritual life in little things.  But it gets more and more difficult as we go on, and that is the narrowness of the path; that difficulty, those straits in which we get because we have to let go and let go and let go.  And the further we go, the more everything seems to be chaos.  Yet we trust that through this chaos we will find order.

The Courage to Be Yourself

Nobody can give you a guarantee.  Nobody can say, “Yes, you will pull through.  Yes, there is order there.”  No, the only thing you have to fall back on is your courage and also your memory – your memory that every time you did that in the past, every time you died, you were born to a greater, more comprehensive order.

So the path is really this going on from harmony to greater harmony, always through periods of disharmony and discord, or from life to life, always through periods of death.  That is the path; and the dynamism of that is faith, is courage.

So you need faith.  You need faith in yourself, in that inner voice, the voice of circumstance that tells you what is the right thing for you and the courage to do it, to really enter into it.  And in the last analysis, really, the courage to be yourself.

Question by a retreatant: When you are on the part of the path which is inclusive, and you hear a voice, but you are not completely sure – is there some way to tell?

That’s a very important question and it is really the question of self-deception.  “How can I be sure I am not deceiving myself?”  The answer is, you can’t. 

That is what faith is all about – that you trust and you go on even though you are not absolutely sure that you are not deceiving yourself; you trust that it will fall in place eventually if you go on trying not to deceive yourself.  The wrong answer would be, “Well, since I can’t be sure that I’m not deceiving myself, let’s go on deceiving myself.”  No, that’s not the answer.  The answer is, “I can’t ever really be sure.”  Only when you feel, “Now I’m sure that I’m not deceiving myself” – that’s the one moment you can be sure that you are deceiving yourself.

At any other time, you are suspended precisely in that vacuum that is necessary for the path.  Otherwise there wouldn’t be anywhere to go.  You’d just be stuck.  It’s the space that makes room for doubt and only in that space of doubt can faith move.

There is no other way.  There is no other space for faith, except doubt.  Doubt is the vacuum into which faith moves.  And the doubt, “Am I not deceiving myself?”  is the vacuum into which my total dedication not to deceive myself – trusting that God will help me and teach me – moves.

That’s as much of an answer as I can give, because the question is an existential one.  It is not a matter of answering it so that you can write it down and take it home with you.  The answer must be something that challenges you to live it out.

Originally given as a talk at a yoga retreat during the summer of 1974.  Reprinted from Integral Yoga, Vol. VII, No. 1, 1975, pp.9-12.