Is faith a journey or the destination?
Being born in an Indian household usually entails a duty towards faith.
It is something that is passed down from the elders more as a task to be completed to make sure the Gods are serviced than an emotion one feels towards the magnificence of the divine.
It was the same for me while growing up where I would be a part of rituals and ceremonies with no context of what was going on.
As I grew older, my elders revealed to me the backstory of some of the festivals and rituals that we did to honor the gods.
At the same time, I got more exposed to the world and my voraciously hungry mind questioned everything and the purpose of it all.
For a long while, I had related the word faith to God, or the divine.
I understood that I wasn’t alone who had been handed over the reins of blind faith- my friends in school, and at home were all in a similar boat and with time many of them entirely rejected the concept of faith, of their existing anything beyond the realms of science.
Now that I think of it, maybe it made them feel like rebels for denying what society accepted as the norms. They guarded their beliefs so fervently that no one could remotely bring them to accept an alternate point of view.
I never really denied, nor completely accepted the existence of there being a higher power but always respected it and the views of others, whatever they held to be true.
But over the years, as I went through tons of books on philosophy, Indian scriptures, and more, I’ve come to realize a few things.
But before that, I’m going to pose a very important question
What is the difference between faith and belief?
For a brief period, unknowingly, I had been interchanging the meaning of these two words.
For clarity — “Faith involves reliance and trust, and it endures in the face of doubts, while belief is simply something we take to be true”
(Taken from Google)
If I go to think back upon it, I was simply following a set of beliefs inculcated within me in a disciplined manner. The more I ventured into the world in search of the ultimate meaning of it all — life, death, our purpose on this planet, the more I seemed to get lost in the complexities of it all.
The world seems like a hollow, debauched place where the only thing certain is our end.
With the mind being caught in the constant war of the wants of the heart, the restlessness of rushing forward and grabbing onto the things I think I deserve while fending off the meaninglessness of it all, I was able to arrive at an interesting thought or a statement.
Faith is the destination one arrives at when we realize all the wars we fight cumulatively and individually, internally and externally ultimately lead to nothing but emptiness, and that is when Faith acts as our guardrails.
In simple terms, the more we think we are moving away from faith, the closer we are to coming back to it in a full circle. Each day we move away from it, we are moving closer to it as compared to the previous day.
I have finally arrived at this conclusion which my torrential life a little more meaningful, a little more peaceful, knowing that there is something out there in a realm I can’t comprehend, the source of little purity that is within me — looking out for me, patiently guiding me through life from behind the scenes.
