Funky Zen Monkey Grin: 09/09

Wednesday

Keep the Faith; Lose the Hope

...from the Field Center

Many of us may spend long stretches hoping for something—
hoping that things will work out with someone else,
hoping for the best, hoping against hope, and so on.

And, while hope certainly is better than hopelessness
at least as far as the attendant feeling goes,
it has nothing to do with deliberate creating,
and in Field training terms, it actually works against
our deliberate engagement of our creative authority.

Because the world around us and everything we see in it
is the effect of our inner life,
hoping for something amounts to waiting for the world
to utter a magic word that only we can speak.

So, our waiting may keep us from outright despair,
but the problem is that the world also is waiting,
and must wait exactly as long as we do.

Florence Scovel Shinn tells the story of a young man
in one of her classes who always tried to come up with
questions she couldn’t answer.

One day, he asked, “Why is it then that a lot of women
who have hope chests never get married?”

(A hope chest is the traditional store of linens
and other household goods
that women used to acquire in anticipation of marriage).

Florence replied, “Because it is a hope chest,
and not a faith chest.”

Anticipation, like hope, looks to the future,
and in this respect alone,
abandons the only time that reality can be claimed,
which is right now.

Faith claims the thing as already done,
and rests fully in the feeling of that now
—and it is this claim, now, in the living present,
that has the power to fulfill itself.

Hope not only misses the creative opportunity of the present
but also exports the authority of creatorship to the thing created.

Imagine a writer who sits at his desk all day
looking at a blank piece of paper,
and when asked by friends what he is doing,
replies, “I’m hoping a book will be written.”

We may laugh at this writer’s confusion of cause and effect,
but aren’t we doing the same thing when, for example,
we hope that we will recover from an illness,
or that someone else will like us in a special way,
or that money will show up before the rent is due?

In the great story of our life, each of us is the writer.

We cannot dictate the timing, ways and means,
or exact form of fulﬁllment,
but we can choose who we are and refuse to settle for less.

We can stop hoping for happy endings along the way,
and instead, write them deliberately in the language of our belief.

By doing this, by aligning inwardly
with whatever fulﬁllment we want,
we not only immediately feel good, but also set into motion
everything needed for the realization of whatever we’ve claimed.

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