A Divine Ocean of Trust

     We can trust a friend. We can trust God. We can trust ourselves or an automobile or logic.

     What is trust?

     Here's what it is not: Trust, or faith, is not confidently and fearlessly standing on firm ground and fighting off skepticism.

     No belief should be a battle against doubt. That would be the opposite of trust. A fight against doubt is grounded in fear of the unknown. It is an attempt to control.

     That is called taking a stand. Control is defensive and terrified of surprise attacks. Battling doubt keeps us where we are and protects what we have.

     Trust, on the other hand, is open and receptive. We must listen to that which we trust to have faith. Trust is submission to the trusted.

     When we trust, we swim in an infinitely deep ocean. We also let ourselves be pulled into the murky depths at times. We remain buoyed, however, by our free will; we cannot sink and drown unwillingly. We must consent if we are to submerge ourselves in trust.

      We are not anchored to the dark bottom. Rather, in faith we drift with the currents of the Other. We connect. There is no way to tell where the liquid stops and we begin.

     Our perspective is looking down at the unfathomable mystery. Questions always pop up. For example: What is in the soul of the man or woman we trust? Where is s/he leading us? Does the logic we rely on really tie us to ultimate reality? Is God faithful and good? Is the car we sit in running out of gas? Will the lottery ticket pay off?

     The murky depths hold many mysteries, yes. But we have light above us, at our backs. We can see what's coming up at us more and more clearly the closer it gets. More and more is revealed the longer we trust and listen and look and open up our hearts to the Beyond.

     It's as if the light above us gets brighter, the more we trust. Our path into the obscure new becomes clearer and clearer.

     Trust by its nature has no boundaries. So it is not an island we can own and defend against marauding uncertainty and ridicule. We must submerge ourselves in the sometimes cold, sometimes comfortingly warm waters of trust.

     We accept the occasional doubt or pang of fear and foreboding. Then we remind ourselves that trust is an unlimited body of water we willingly dive into. We surround ourselves with the same waters that, in another form, nourish crops.

      So we cannot protect faith from change. On the contrary, faith protects us from stagnation. And from mechanistic inhumanity.

     It is not enough to say "I will trust." When we trust, we affirm, "I trust."

     In short, faith is as Divine as the endless night sky. Taking the plunge and trusting opens our eyes to the deep, mysterious, beyond-our-control Something many call God.

     When we experience that Sacred Something in another, we can experience love. In ourselves, it often manifests as a conscience, or a belief in the ethical principles and trust in human goodness we cannot see when standing only on an atoll of evidence and inferences.

     Whatever its forms, trust is holy. To violate it is profane.