be·lief  (bəˈlēf/)  noun -- 2. trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.

Friends, today’s episode is called “Belief”.  This is the tie-a-knot-and-hang-on episode.  When all is said, done and practiced in difficult times—no matter what our strategies for getting through—there is a point when none of these strategies matter at all.  Random acts of kindness, meditation/being still, keep-on-keeping-on action are emphasized because these are things that we can DO.

But today, we consider the foundation…the stuff that is behind the curtain.  What is there when you pull everything away and look?  What keeps you going when nothing seems to be working, when everything has gone wrong?   

On June 17th, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina, a white supremacist and terrorist entered a bible study at Mother Emanuel and was welcomed with open arms by a black faith community.  But the surreal happened…The visitor pulled a gun and ended their precious, open and welcoming lives with hatred and bullets.

When asked how the people of Mother Emanuel AME have made it through the murders of 9 of their beloved community, the Reverend Waltrina Middleton, cousin of one of the dead spoke about how one goes on.  She said, “because we live in God, I can live into forgiveness.”  Forgiveness and mercy has been a key to many in the black community when facing grief and the constant beat of tyranny and oppression.

In September 1942, an Austrian doctor named Viktor Frankl was enslaved along with his wife and parents in Auschwitz a Nazi camp.  Three of the family were sent to their deaths, while Viktor was marched to another camp where he clung to life until the camp was liberated. Other than a sister, his entire family was wiped out.

As he set about shoring up his fragments, Frankl turned his study to the question “What allows a person who has been stripped of everything to hold on?” His book Man’s Search for Meaning came from that question.

His primary interest was in the prisoners who, in spite of everything, “walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread…they offer[ed] sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

In both of these true stories, it is evident that the people’s core beliefs are what frees them.

I contend that there is a guiding principle for your life.  I personally cannot know what that is for each of you.  But my experience with many faith traditions, including those who call themselves “nones” with “no faith”, and those who claim Science as their bottom line—ALL of us have something that we know to be true.  It’s a knowing, it’s what you hold in your core, your belly…Science believes that there are organizing principles that cannot be rationally defied, everything can be figured out eventually.  Facts govern.  "Nones" might have as a grounding tenet “that all is basically good or can be made good” or any number of ideas.  Muslims may have as their guiding principle that the idol of the self needs to submit to Allah and peace is yours.  Jews tell a narrative of story and law that to walk humbly with thy God and to repair the world is redemption in this world.  Christians give the most credence and ink to their relationship with Jesus and to the orthodoxy of right thought.  This is where the notion if I believe rightly then I am saved or redeemed.

Buddhism has at its core the path to the elimination of suffering, that human beings can solve human problems on their own.  Buddha was not terribly concerned with the questions about eternalness or who God was.  The story he came up with to answer those questions was:  “if you were shot with an arrow, would you waste time and breath asking who shot the arrow,