If you think that the faith required from you is beyond human capabilities, you still lack awareness and understanding of what it means to be human.
~ from practice
One of the greatest challenges is to continually trust something or someone, be it a particular life path, a person, a principle, or a deity. Once an oath is made, whether out loud or in one's heart and soul, it's a given that this is for a lifetime. Otherwise, what's the point of it all? Believe today, doubt tomorrow, be loyal for one hour, betray the next? Then this faith isn't worth a dime.
But like most of the great things that have the potential to really change the world, faith will be questioned and challenged. It will happen again and again, and every time it happens, there will be more and more reasons to stop believing. And the most challenging thing is that you will never know for sure if what you believe in is actually a complete lie, someone's cruel joke, a trick, a manipulation, your greatest mistake... or the only true path and the ultimate way to whatever it is you are trying to achieve.
(Photo by Diana Simumpande on Unsplash)
That's exactly why it is not a logical task. It cannot be solved by checking it, asking others for an advise, reading a wise book, practicing meditation, performing a scientific analysis, or even using your spiritual powers (if you have them!) or intuition. The whole point is that all these methods and practices you can resort to in order to check whatever you must believe in can and will fail, yet it will not mean anything. It all comes down to whether or not you keep going in this direction you have chosen, keep the oath that you've made, keep trying again and again and again... despite a million things, people, events that will scream to stop, turn around, and stop believing this "utter lie."
This is a shaky ground. I think that questions of faith and loyalty are too personal, too specific, so no advises can be given to anyone except the one along the lines of "listen to your heart." I will not even try to figure out if one's heart can lie, but I can say we must learn to distinguish the voice of the heart from that of our emotions, hormones, needs, wants, nerves, and fears. Those things can and will confuse the hell out of anyone who gives in to them or takes them for granted.
I've had so many issues and confusions with faith that today it's hard to tell whether its lack or it's overabundance in the most critical moments led me to more problems and failures (or tests and challenges?). Sometimes I question myself, what if I did things differently? What it what I believed in was a mistake? Or what if my doubts were a mistake and if I believed more and did more everything would turn out differently? That I will never know.
The only way to get somewhat close to figuring it out (again, not logically) is to choose once and for all which way I go. Do I believe fully, am I loyal fully, am I completely dedicated... or do I just drop it completely and walk the other way? It seems like there is no middle ground. In some aspects of life we can't do "just a little bit" or "around 95%". It has to be all or nothing, a choice has to be made.
Don't get me wrong, it's not always something absolute and GLOBAL. It could be about that one aspect of life where we give it our all or nothing.
As for me at this very moment... faith and loyalty I'm keeping in mind while writing this post is about something enormous, and these are my vague thoughts on the subject. Much more to be thought, felt, and done.