“There is no problem in any situation that faith will not solve.”
What if we truly believed there is a God- a beneficent order to things, a force that’s holding things together without our conscious control? What if we could see, in our daily lives, the working of that force? What if we believed it loved us somehow, and cared for us, and protected us? What if we believed we could afford to relax?
The physical body is at work every moment, and array of mechanisms with a brilliance of design and efficiency our human efforts have never begun to match. Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, our ears hear, our hair grows. And we don’t have to make them work-they just do. Planets revolve around the sun, seeds become flowers, embryos become babies, and with no help from us. Their movement is built into a natural system. You and I are integral parts of that system, too. We can let our lives be directed by the same force that makes flower grow-or we can do it ourselves.
To trust in the force that moves the universe is faith. Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary. Faith is believing that the universe is on your side, and that the universe knows what it’s doing. Faith is a psychological awareness of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions. Our attempts to direct this force only interferes with it. Our willingness to relax into it allows it to work on our behalf. Without faith, we’re frantically trying to control what is not our business to control, and fix what is not in our power to fix. What we’re trying to control is much better off without us, and what we’re trying to fix can’t be fixed by us anyway. Without faith, we’re wasting time.
There are objective, discernible laws of physical phenomena. Take gravity, for instance, or the law of thermodynamics. You don’t exactly have faith in the law of gravity, so much as you just know it is.
There are objective, discernible laws of non-physical phenomena, as well. These two sets of laws-those which rule both the external and internal worlds are parallel.
Externally, the universe supports our physical survival. Photosynthesis in plants and plankton in the ocean produce oxygen that we need in order to breathe. It is important to respect the laws that rule the physical universe because violation of these laws threatens our survival. When we pollute the oceans or destroy plant life, we are destroying our support system and so are destroying ourselves.
Internally, the universe supports as equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. Human relationships exist to produce love. When we pollute our relationships with unloving thoughts, or destroy or abort them with unloving attitudes, we are threatening our emotional survival.
So the laws of the universe merely describe the way things are. These laws aren’t invented: they’re discovered. They are not dependent on our faith. Faith in them merely shows we understand what they are. Violation of these laws doesn’t bespeak a lack of goodness; just a lack of intelligence. We respect the laws of nature in order to survive. And what is the highest internal law? That we love one another. Because if we don’t, we will all die. As surely as a lack of oxygen will kill us, so will a lack of love.
A page from the book
A Return to Love/ Refections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles
By Marianne Williamson