THE SECOND HALF OF THE FAITH JOURNEY

By
Bill Cottringer

“Faith doesn’t fixate on the ownership of absolute truth of the mystery of life, it allows our experience and understanding of this mystery to grow as it may, with or without our belief and consent.” ~The author.

One process seems most real to me—the creative movement from thinking I know something to humbly realizing I don’t know something, which gives way to really knowing it, until that same process starts all over again with something else. Although I thought this to be true several years ago, I believe I am really just now starting the unknowing process of the second half of my life so I can open up to experiencing and understanding the whole mystery of life.

Success in any endeavor in life follows the same spiritual path and creative process. But growing your faith to open up to letting go of your stranglehold of all that you think you know to be so about the mysteries of God, life, love, hope and purpose that drive your thinking, feeling and acting, is resisted out of overwhelming fear and anxiety of what will replace it? That is exactly what is happening today with institutional resistance to lightening up on our grip of what we are so convinced of as being true, so that we can let go of our useless half-truths and start benefitting from learning the whole truth and then using it to cure the problems of today instead of just aggravating them.

The second half of our faith journey is where we make a remarkable transition from between just being a pretending, passive victim-observer of live packed with safety space, towards being a heroic player-participator willing to walk into the unknown just because it feels right by faith alone. This second half of our faith journey is where we have our faith tested and affirmed by getting vivid and super-real glimpses of what heaven is like. And it is also where our moral consciences start ruling over our psychological one’s, releasing our soul’s power of infinite creativity, compassion, unconditional love, understanding and potential to use those virtues productively in our awareness and actions to help create a better world.

During this second half of our journey in which we have become spiritual beings on a human journey, we begin the difficult challenge of accepting more humility in realizing we haven’t really captured the whole truth. Of course we make this more complicated than it needs to be, by not seeing reality clearly.

What needs to be seen to make this inevitable transition easier, is the distance between where we are and where we want to be. And more than anything else, it is the words we think and communicate with that make the truth of all the obstacles and fears in the gap more real and insurmountable. Thus the paralysis of being stuck in the first half gets worse.

It is ironic that words—the very things that keep us from unknowing untruthful beliefs so that we can really know, understand and use the whole truth—are the curse that causes the gap and stuckness, but also the gift with which we can eventually expand our conscious awareness and move forward into the second half of the journey.

Getting unstuck from the first half of the journey is a matter of gradually seeing how we make our small, inaccurate and incomplete personal versions of reality seem righter and bigger than they really are, compared to others. This delusion makes our personal piece of the truth treasure map impervious from growing, at least until we finally wake up to what is happening here.

The main reason our whole world is so slow to move to this second half of the journey is that everything that has been told about it, has become too irrelevant, unworkable and meaningless for us today. To make the transition easier, we have to stop pretending that we have the answers and the words to communicate the truth, because we don’t. But, it is that very frank, humble admission which opens our minds and hearts to using our gifts to find the right answers.

By learning to communicate more assertively—conveying tentativeness, equality, freedom, empathy, and with more listening—we can gradually let go of the aggression and passivity that reinforce the fears which keep us hostage in the first half of the journey. But the trick is we all have to figure out what true assertiveness is that isn’t just another addictive half-truth.