Artwork: Murmuration by Renee Walden - https://www.walden.co.nz/

The Question Nobody Can Answer For You: Your Wholeness Already Has

Someone asked me recently about my faith.

I was stunned but not surprised. Another “f” word to me. Not because the question wasn’t sincere. It was. But the word itself lands like a trap. Faith = Religion = No thank you. It assumes a level of status - if you are part of that “f” club then you belong, are allowed, acceptable, okay to some. As if the person asking can then put you in the right box and know how to deal with you, relate to you, or speak to you. It assumes you believe answers live outside you because you are incomplete without an external source to guide you, pray to and follow its rules. It assumes you are okay outsourcing your beliefs to a proxy (usually male), an earthly conduit to a higher (he) source, and following the masses who also believe.

I found the question invasive and stated quickly that I am a certified spiritual counselor and a recovering Catholic - a way to block the question so the person wouldn’t try to sell me on joining her group or belief system.

But it stayed with me. And on a trail this week, things came together in a way that helped me understand what I actually wanted to say.

Nietzsche said it plainly: “Once you label me, you negate me.”

The moment someone wants to label you as someone of faith, as Christian, as atheist, a wife, a mother, a believer, a skeptic, gay/lesbian, single, married, rich, poor - something closes and boxes you in. The infinite gets folded into a container, and whatever doesn’t fit gets left on the floor. The label for some can feel like solid ground, like secure containment and belonging but it’s actually oblivion. It’s relegating you to one thing - a word, a label, a stereotype. It puts you in a small box and says that’s all you are - nothing more.

But that’s not all you are.

What I find in opposition to being labeled by another or even when I do it to myself is to open up more fully, almost in defiance of the attempt to be negated and boxed in, and remember who I am truly. That I am everything, and I am nothing. I am all of it. Not as a cop-out, not as spiritual bypassing - but as the most precise, uncontainable truth of what a human being actually is. The everythingness and the nothingness. Whole. Infinite. Already. No label or membership required.

That’s not a religion. It’s not even a belief, exactly. It’s more like a remembering.

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