A question of faith
Tracy James writes about a question of faith and living adventurously
I was sitting in Meeting on Sunday and felt angry. What was I doing here? What do I actually believe? What is faith and what is the point of living adventurously? I felt more and more frustrated and upset as I thought about it. Tears welled behind my eyes with grief. There was no satisfactory answer.
It is over three years since I sat down with my husband for a Meeting for Clearness in Newbury Meeting House. I was relatively new to Quakers and married for a year or so. My husband and I had news of infertility due to damage caused to my fallopian tubes by an operation I’d had when I was four years old. It was an absolute blow and not how we’d envisaged our start to married life.
Following the Meeting for Clearness it became clear that my husband and I wanted to go ahead with IVF, and we started our journey. Our Friends thought that what we were doing was exciting: living life adventurously. However, here I was today: no baby. Just loss. And the agonising decision to stop.
I kept reading Advices & queries and was annoyed. Why on earth did I think that living life adventurously led to success? I was convinced that was the message in the book. Then I reflected on what faith has meant to me over the years.
During my school years I was always so desperate to know that things were going to be all right, that I didn’t have to be scared all the time, and that I would feel safe and confident. But I never felt that way; I was bullied consistently. My solution was to challenge fear through action. I worked hard. I avoided or prepared for all the scenarios of failure or ridicule and ensured that didn’t happen. I succeeded through academic and personal achievement. I won in my own little way. I beat the bullies. I fought uncertainties and I gained some control.
I did as much as I could over those three years: three abdominal surgeries, five egg collections, four courses of injections and hormones, one miscarriage at nine weeks, four embryo transfers and eight embryos returned to my womb. But, in the end, I had to put faith in something I couldn’t control. ‘Everything was going to be alright’ was the message I kept telling myself. I hoped this time the statement could be true and that I could develop comfort and confidence in having a little faith.
But where do I go from here? Having faith doesn’t always bring what you’d hoped, and doing all you physically can doesn’t either. How do I bring comfort to my life when I’ve expended all my energy and used what I thought was my strength? The term living adventurously is not necessarily as it seems.
I kept coming back to people; strengthening my own self in line with God and with support from others; and being the best I can be and in the best partnership with my husband. At the moment that just doesn’t seem enough or even possible and I’m disillusioned with life. Sitting in Meeting is becoming more and more difficult. I’m worried all the lights will go out.
Comments
Your writing has been an uncomfortable experience but has allowed me to come to terms with the grief of life. We tend to see grief as negative but it is an integral part of living. Facing it may be necessary in order to taste the potential of joy especially in our relationships. Accepting grief is a crucial part of wholeness. But, being swallowed by it is a danger. George Fox said : « For looking down at distraction, you are swallowed up in it, but looking at the light that reveals the confusions, you will see over them and overcome them and you will find grace and strength ; and there is the first step to peace. »
Im « Experiment with Light », we share this process together. There is the initial process of involving the body, then the vital stage of seeing one’s own hurt and one’s blocks, but not letting them take over. Instead, we trust the light, the power of consciousness and wait together. At the end of the stages, we can share, if we wish, knowing that everything is confidential and is not used as a way of giving advice. My own practice is weekly, via skype, with Friends around the world and monthly with French Friends.
So for me, the Quaker way of meeting together in stillness is the most effective tool in facing whatever life throws at us.
Richard Thompson or, for further info - .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
By Sylvette T on 5th August 2016 - 13:40
Dear Tracy
I do not have any answers for you. I can only say that I am so very sorry to hear of your deep disappointments, which brought tears to my eyes. I am holding you in the light, as I am sure the Friends at your Meeting will be doing. The lights have gone out for me a few times in my life but they have always come back on again, and my strength has always returned. I trust that yours will too.
By sglasbey on 5th August 2016 - 17:25
The article by Tracy James on in the 4th of August edition seemed to raise many of the classical issues of the spiritual journey. We all tend to live in our ego as we are growing older, a place where we try ‘being the best I can be’, where we want to control life and work our hardest to do so. Where our prayers are more of a shopping list of things we want from God. Where we struggle to be perfect to please God. This is all perfectly normal. But then in mid-life things happen that break our life apart and we enter a dark night of the soul. The important thing is to live with it, not fight it, or ignore it.
At the other end we come out aware that we are not in control, and that is okay. We find that we actually experience the Light, rather than it being a head thing. That faith is trusting whatever happens is for the best, even if that seems totally opaque. That we trust that God knows best. We experience that God loves us regardless of anything that we do – it is called grace. This all becomes a lived experience. The dark night is really the start of the spiritual journey, a journey that lasts the rest of our lives. But it is not an easy journey to take.
By Richard on 11th August 2016 - 8:57
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