“In What Do You Trust?” with Jean This Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

In an interview with Ezra Klein (the NYTimes columnist and podcaster), James Talarico (the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas) described how he understands faith:

After studying the word faith in seminary,  I found that in many translations of the Bible, it’s belief (in a concept or idea).   But it can also be translated as trust which to me is much more experiential.  

Trusting that love is going to get you through the hour, through the day, through your life, that love is going to carry us forward, that love will ultimately prevail even though it’s temporarily defeated...To me that’s what my faith feels like, it feels like trust, almost like  when I learned how to swim at our neighborhood pool. I remember my swim teacher telling me, “don’t fight the water, let the water carry you.”   

There’s so much temptation in our lives to control our surroundings, to control other people…   The opposite of that control is faith, trust, letting life, letting the universe, hold you up and not fighting it.  So that’s what it feels like for me…

Listening to him, I was struck by the similarities with how I understand faith in Buddhism.    Rather than holding to a belief in a particular concept or doctrine, faith in Buddhism is experiential.  It is grounded in a trust in the practice based on our lived experience.  

Through practice,  we are  “faithing” –  or learning to trust– what is true.  We are learning, through our own experience, what leads to suffering and what leads to the end of suffering.     Is this practice onward leading?  Does it lead to less suffering and to a more loving and compassionate relationship with ourselves and the world?  And, if so, how does it do that?   

 The Four Noble Truths offer the road map for our journey, but it must be tested in real life.  

This week lets explore and discuss our own experience of faith. What started us on the path and what have we learned?  In what do we trust?  And why?

All are welcome! Registration and Zoom information available here.

With mettā,
Minneapolis Insight