Faith worth keeping . . .

It's Thor's day … and the mailbox received several notes regarding “faith.”

We know how much pain is involved in our lives, how many problems there are already. We have no way of avoiding our neurosis. Acknowledging that is one step toward faith. – Chögyam Trungpa

Today is the 242nd anniversary of the end of the American Revolutionary War. The British surrendered on this date in 1781 Yorktown, Virginia, after Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen kicked off the armed conflict in Lexington and Concord six years earlier in April 1775.

The spy novelist David Cornwell (writing) under the name John le Carré), was born on this date in 1931 Poole, England. His spies aren't sexy or daring, like James Bond, but tired, lonely men, who have little faith in their own government more than they trusted their enemies.

Keeping the faith? Jeffries has a plan.

Sometimes as an antidote / to fear of death, / I eat the stars. – Rebecca Elson, in A Responsibility to Awe, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 2001. Read and listen to the entire short poem read by physicist Janna Levin on Maria Popova's Marginalian (scroll down to the reading by Levin).

Speaking of faith in poetry: Louise Glück has died. The laureate of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature passed into the wherever on this last October 13, 2023.

I am wondering if I have ever understood faith—or if I want it now that I am getting the point.

Now I know that faith is not believing-certain-ideas-all-evidence-to-the-contrary. It is not dogged loyalty to childhood conditioning or pledges of allegiance to sacred formulas and official explanations. It is surely not the addictive repetition of rituals or practices that keep [their notion of] God under control. These approaches give the ego comfort, but they give little comfort to truth … Faith seems to make people spacious … to contain and receive all things, to hold onto nothing, with almost no need to fear or judge rashly … people of faith are comfortable with the totality. – Richard Rohr

“One Ambition”

All I ever really wanted
was to whistle with my fingers . . .

now that was something

I thought that if I gave my life to
I might attain.

– by Paul Hostovsky from Is That What That Is. Future Cycle Press, 2017.