Launching Ceremony

Potentially the most celebratory word we have in the English language "Ceremony" carries many meanings. There are wedding Ceremonies, Ceremonials of the dead on their funeral date. Ceremonies when we graduate, fall in love, have a birthday, celebrate something significant in our culture, and in some families there are ceremonies for when you are sent. 

Ceremonies can be big or small, with one person or with many. It is almost always about remembering from whence you came, and in the inverse, where you are going. This week has been nuts for me, I have celebrated with friends at my arrival to France, and we had a ceremonial dinner to welcome the beginners to the base here. It's almost unreal that there has been so much change in so little time, but so far I love it here.

I've been pondering on the idea of Faith without works, and Faith with works. Faith of God and Faith in God. On the scale of conversion to Christianity, it would make the most sense that Faith of God is very low on the scale (I'm referring to the Engel scale here, it starts at -10 and goes to 10. 1 is newly converted Christian) but what do I mean by this? Faith that God exists, that there is some higher being other than us, or even openness to the idea that there is another dimension that exists outside of our own consciousness. For a long time I was within this category, as someone who was raised with the idea of God I learned concepts that opened me up to learning some things about the Bible. There was also a period of time in my young teenage years where I felt like exploring other spiritualities and philosophies was a good idea. While today I believe that this was all part of my process to having faith in God, I can confidently say this faith in God thing was not born until recently this year. As James puts it "Faith without works is dead", a haunting verse to many, as it should be. Works are the direct result of Faith in God. However if you simply have works and no faith in God, you have dead works, and maybe faith of God. The most direct way of putting this is that if you don't lay your life down on the line, and trust in God completely and fully, then there is absolutely no way you have faith in God. Yet when you do this it is the most rewarding, fulfilling, exciting, and sometimes intuitive thing that we can do being part of God's creation. Because suddenly we're thrust into a world where we can only follow the directions of how the smartest, highest, and most benevolent being would decide how to do things. It's quite beautiful. Intense really, and to be a part of this work with God is the greatest pleasure we have access to here on Earth, until otherwise specified.