Our Adventure of Faith
The book Adventure of Faith is a deeply personal account of a young woman’s quest for God, first as a Catholic nun and then, in her middle and old age, as a disciple of Maharaj Charan Singh. The book begins with an epigram by the Hungarian theologian Ladislaus Boros: “God always remains an adventure whose outcome we do not know.”
All of us are on our own individual adventures of faith. We’re explorers in the transcendent world of spiritual experience. Through initiation into Surat Shabd Yoga, we’re seeking God, hoping to understand our true identity and the meaning of our human existence.
We can’t deny that this path is an adventure, though that probably isn’t what we thought we were signing up for when we asked for initiation. We thought we knew the outcome. We would follow the instructions given at our initiation, we’d live and meditate per those instructions, and we would achieve peace and bliss within a reasonable time and live happily ever after, hopefully never to return to this world, this “vale of tears,” as the saints call it.
No doubt, parts of that scenario have come true, or may yet come true, but walking our spiritual path has not turned out to be such a tidily summarized pursuit. Having gained some maturity, by now we might agree that this path is indeed an adventure whose outcome we do not know. Having undertaken this adventure, we do know, at least intellectually, that the Master’s love, the Shabd, is annihilating our ego (as promised!) and thereby freeing us from every image and concept of God our minds have ever conjured.
Through our spiritual practice of bhajan and simran, our ego identity – whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim or Jew; man or woman; in success or in failure – is being turned upside down. We may not yet have experienced the ultimate blissful outcome, but, like the author of Adventure of Faith, we have left the shore of the known to venture into the unknown, which is to lose our identity and merge with our divine source.
When she was 13, in 1937, the author, Shraddha Liertz, heard and felt God speak to her. She writes:
Through that inner experience [of hearing God’s call], God became my fate…. Since that moment my goal has been to encounter him – the One who called me by name and demanded my undivided heart. In the following years I realized more and more that it is truly an adventure to get involved with God and surrender your life unconditionally to him, because you do not know what He will make of it. It is indeed an adventure to step onto the path of abandonment to God, since the way ahead cannot be seen…. If I had known in advance the countless twists and turns and the steep ridges awaiting me, I would never have had the courage to step on it. Yet the longer I followed this path, the clearer it became to me that there was no turning back.
Many of us can identify with the author’s description. Would we have had the courage to undertake our own journey if we had known what was in store? For this author, it all began one spring day, she was taking the train home from school. She was standing in the open doorway of her train car, ready to jump off at her stop. She writes that she might have been thinking of that day’s lessons or about her homework. She might also have been thinking about the boy she liked who rode on the same train as she did. She notes that “the one thing she certainly was not thinking about at that moment was God.”
She goes on:
Suddenly she felt as if an invisible light, coming from above, was flowing over her. She was spellbound, completely overwhelmed by what was happening. At the same time, she ‘heard’ a clear and distinct voice inside, saying, “Preserve your heart’s capacity to love, for you know not whether God will one day ask you for your undivided heart.”
Our stories of how we’ve been pulled to the path are quite different, but they are each just as miraculous in their own way. And each of us is responding to that pull, that call, as best as we can. We are pursuing our own inner adventure, which, this author writes, “cannot be done without a conscious ‘Yes’ to [the Lord’s] will as it manifests itself in all the circumstances of our daily life.”
As adventurers, we have to be bold, courageous, curious, and persistent. To develop those qualities, we need the capacity to live with ambiguity, paradox, and a certain amount of insecurity, because we do not know for sure – yet – those unknown outcomes that are part of our spiritual exploration.
For example, we are told we must live according to God’s will. But how do we know what that is? Maharaj Charan Singh clarifies that we can know for sure the will of the Father only when we go beyond the realm of the mind, beyond the realm of karma, and then merge into the Shabd. He explains that in the meantime, we must be firm on the principles of Sant Mat and attend to our meditation. In Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, he tells us that all we can do until we’ve risen above the mind is to try to live in his will:
We are trying not to compromise with the principles. We are trying to give our full time to meditation. We are trying to mould our life according to the way of Sant Mat. So we are trying to live in the will of the master. That helps us.
Then he confirms our sense of the futility of our paltry efforts:
[But] if it is not destined that you will accept your destiny, how will you accept it? You think something is in your hands and another thing is not in your hands? Your thinking is not in your hands; to accept your destiny is not in your hands; not to accept your destiny also is not in your hands. Your thinking will be conditioned in that way which has already been destined.
And then he turns this brain twister around in a way that shows us how we can resolve the paradox:
What more could we want, if we can trust ourselves to the Lord? What more do we want? We think we know more than the Lord? What else could we want – that he will take care of us, he will absolve us from all our plannings, all our thinking, that he takes our destiny in his own hands – what more could we want in life? These are the most fortunate people.
We are the most fortunate people. Explorers trust the goal of their undertaking, and that trust makes it possible for us to persevere through our difficulties. For many of us, that trust that the Master is taking care of us in every way is difficult to hold on to. But we learn, over time, that it is a gift from him, and that it comes from within.
God instills in us just enough love to be drawn to him in the form of the Master, and then the adventure begins. First, we must build a preliminary faith to practice the path. Hazur tells us that we can develop real faith only by attending to our meditation, and that it comes from within, not through other people’s experiences or by following the Master around. He says in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II: “Real faith you will be able to build up only by experience, and you get that real faith not by the whole experience, but with glimpses of experiences.”
Glimpses of experiences, he emphasizes. So, we’re imbibing the path in little bite-sized pieces – glimpses of the truth. He continues:
If you meditate, you do start seeing the signs. It may be glimpses, it may be visions, it may be some other sorts of things. You start seeing the signs and that deepens your faith; that strengthens your faith. Actual faith you will get only when you have the right experience, not before that. So we have so many types of faith, I would say.
Certainly, we can see this in our lives. After initiation, and even before, we begin to see signs of grace, even in the most mundane situations. For everyone those signs are different, and very personal. In one way or another, they give us enough faith to take the next step, and then the next. They encourage us to persevere.
We learn, as the author of Adventure of Faith learned, that without a relationship with a true, living Master, we cannot take even one step on this path. We learn that we cannot force or will ourselves to “make progress.” Everything that comes to us – every effort we make, every insight, every round of simran, every inkling of surrender – is a result of the Lord’s grace. She writes that it is God himself who wants the return of our soul, “that tiny drop out of the limitless ocean of divine Being. Who is anyone to desire union with God? It is God who infuses the longing into the human heart – it is the working of his grace.”
Towards the end of the book, the author, by now an old woman, reflects on what she experienced over the decades:
Even if [disciples] cannot yet experience the presence of their Master and the purifying and transforming effect of meditation, they may be sure it is working inside. They can trust that the moment will come when they will consciously realize everything that secretly has taken place within them. Then they will be able to look back on the way behind them and be able to continue and complete the way ahead in the light and sound of the Shabd. Until then, they must walk in darkness and trust the word of their Master.
While it may sound bleak, walking in darkness could be the greatest gift of all. Because when we feel helpless, frightened, and maybe even hopeless, we reach out to someone or something to help us. We are stripped of all preconceptions and assumptions. We surrender our ego – it just happens naturally. We realize our utter helplessness, which enables us to grab on to our Father’s hand, because we have nowhere else to go.
If it’s dark, so be it. Our meditation is just holding on to the Master’s hand. The more we lean into his love and grace, through our meditation, through sheer need, the more our trust grows. The more we surrender to the Master by doing what he has asked us to do, the more we feel his guiding hand and the more we’re able to trust in him, like a child who’s never been hurt.
Hazur has told us, in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II:
Everything is done by the grace of the Father in this world. A seeker can achieve nothing without his grace…. Unless he wishes, nobody can reach him. We are all blind, groping in the dark. He is the only one who can show us the light out of this darkness. And he has his own ways and means to show that light to us.
And so, our adventure continues…