Short on Faith

The biggest ailment facing our global society today is that we are short on faith. Well, being short on faith is in the top three ailments facing our global society, I'm pretty sure. When I refer to faith I'm not talking about religious faith. I'm talking about a deep abiding faith in life itself. Some people who call themselves religious have this faith, some don't. I don't believe there is a statistical correlation between being religious and having faith. If there is any statistical correlation it may very well be that people who are quietly religious have faith, while people who are loudly religious cling to religion out of a dearth of faith closer to outright fear.

What I am writing about is having faith when things go really wrong. Or, having faith when we're just in a bad mood. Both are real events signifying actual movements of this complex universal system we are embedded in. It seems strange to imagine saying, when things are going really wrong, "have faith, things are, in fact, going really wrong. It's not just you're imagination." But believe it or not, if we know that things are, in fact, going really wrong, and can feel that this is part of a larger order of things going right, well, it helps. The same is true for something as passing as a bad mood. A bad mood is something we can easily write off as something just plain wrong with us. But when you look at your astrological transits you can account for bad moods, or any kind of mood, for that matter (usually by looking at transits to and from the Moon). Even a bad mood is a part of the workings of this grand system of life that we are embedded in. In that sense, there's just as much room in this universe for a bad mood as there is for a laugh, a song, an orgasm. But a bad mood (or anything bad that happens) has something over the rest of those things. It's very unpleasantness challenges us to surrender our definition of what is happening in such a way that we can literally feel ourselves and our lives as simply movements connected with something much larger than us. It is easy to have faith when you can fall back on your own raw, visceral experience of being intimately connected with, we can even say at one with, a movement that is much larger than your individual sense of self.