I have a strange and wonderful story to share with you about faith. Back in the 1970’s David Hilton is an American baseball player in Arizona who drops out of college to play professionally. He goes through the rigors of playing minor league baseball, and does very well, and eventually becomes a starter for a professional team. Of course he’s excited, it’s what he’s always wanted. He’s trained hard, he has natural aptitude, and has achieved his goal. He goes out after a game with a fellow teammate to dinner and gets viciously sick from eating seafood. He contracts hepatitis and is forced to sit on the bench while he recovers. After this sickness he struggles to play the next few games, and is sent back to the minor leagues. Even after doing well in the minor leagues, it becomes increasingly clear that he’s not going to get his spot back with a professional team. Once that sets in he starts to explore his options.

At the same while all of this is happening in Tokyo, Japan, a man who is exactly the same age as David Hilton is managing a jazz bar.

All his friends and family tell him it’s a poor business idea and that he lacks any aptitude for running a bar, but he proves them wrong, finding a steady stream of customers who enjoy jazz and strong drinks. This man in Tokyo also likes baseball and decides with his wife to rent an apartment within walking distance of a field where a team, the Swallows play their home games.

Hilton thinks outside the box, and has the idea that he might like to play in Japan. So he writes a letter to the Swallows to see if they will pay more than his minor league salary if he and his family move to Tokyo, and he plays for them. They write him back a letter promptly, doubling his salary, and inviting him to play. And here is where things get really strange. It is the opening game of the season in Tokyo. The young man who owns the jazz club in Tokyo is sipping a beer in the outfield. He’s 29 and David Hilton also 29 is the first person at bat.

 

The young man takes a sip of his beer, and in a story repeated hundreds of times says he looks up and he sees there is a glow around David Hilton, the American at his first at bat. On the second pitch of the game, David Hilton hits a double, and at the crack of the bat, this young man in the outfield has a sudden conviction: He could write a novel. Up until this point he’s never written anything, and he has no idea what he would write about. But this sudden faith arises, that if he wrote a novel, no matter what it was about, he would be successful. So he leaves that baseball game, goes to corner drug store and buys a pad of paper and a cheap fountain pen, and starts to wonder what kind of novel he should write. The young man in Haruki Murakami, arguably one of the most prolific Japanese writers of the 20th into the 21st century. Murakami told this story hundreds of times – that it was David Hilton’s double that caused a sudden realization that he could write novels.

Journalists of course loved this story, and one of them met with David Hilton years later and told him this story – about how his single at bat inspired the writing career of someone read by millions of people. And you know what Hilton said? He said something like that’s cool, I believe stuff like that happens all the time. And then he shared that before playing baseball, he actually wanted to be a writer.

Stories like that fill me with wonder, not because I think they’re all that rare. I agree with Hilton – I think stories like this happen all the time, and are actually happening right now, and sometimes we’re open to that. Most of us become so convinced of our own stories: the story of failure, the story of defeat, the story of being left in the dirt, in the ashes. These aren’t untrue stories, but they can miss the most obvious thing: rising from the ashes, an unexpected meeting that changes our life and inevitably changes the world, the feeling of being the dream of our ancestors, the feeling of understanding where we came from, and the realization of how much of our life is completely owed to so many factors coming into play, allowing us to be in angst in this moment.

 

I was inspired by a quote from Maezumi Roshi: “Have good faith in yourself, in the One that you are, not the One you think you should be.” For me the underlying assumption of this statement is that most of us have no idea really who we are. And I don’t have any answers about that, but it does make me curious. It makes me curious about the story that is still being told in this moment, and it makes me curious about how so much of who we are is bound up with who and what we meet. It makes me think about how honoring International Women’s Day is really about honoring all of us. And it makes me think of all the ways we might think we’re honoring someone so different from ourselves, but in truth are actually beginning to learn who we are, not the one we think we are, the one we actually are.

I return like many people to Maya Angelou’s poetry, and I love to hear her read it in her own voice and body. She embodies a strong steadfastness, playfulness, sassiness. She will repeatedly list all the good reasons for despair, and then skirt along the edge of hopelessness, and then take you to a new depth of being alive, of hope.

 

She will list all the good historical reasons why she and many people should feel like they can’t go on, and she’ll even play the part convincingly of someone who can’t can’t muster the strength to go on, and then take you to a place of thriving, not just surviving, but thriving.

One of my favorite visual memories is seeing dust rising off a church pew in a beam of sunlight. Rising dust. Part of me wonders if that’s why many of us are drawn to the heavens. I learned from someone when feeling depressed or blue, sometimes it can help to look at the sky. Every time I’ve done that I kind of lose my bearing a little bit. I feel a little less convinced that I know for certain who I am, and what my problems are really about. It leaves me with a little bit of doubt, and that small doubt, that small hole in the fragment of my identity, it makes a space for something new.

I think having faith in ourselves is not really about us paradoxically. I don’t think we have faith in ourselves because we think we’re strong or capable necessarily, or because we have enough self esteem.

 

I think having faith in ourselves is realizing that we’re not done yet, that we’re not finished. We are still taking shape, impacted by so many factors working on us all at the same time, that it’s mind boggling. And in a very real way, we are all whether we’re aware of it or not, shaping each other. In a very real sense I am making you and you are making me. It might be sudden and dramatic like Hilton and Murakami, a sudden crack of a bat and the birth of a vocation, or it might be subtle, never even noticed.

I remember reading that and experiencing myself that often the people you live with or see regularly are not the most keen judges of the way you’ve changed. When you see someone regularly, the changes are often so subtle that they’re not recognizable. But if someone hasn’t seen you in a year, obvious changes become apparent. This is true in even the most mundane, obvious sense – like aging, weight loss, etc. Those who are close to us will often already be digesting the changes so gradually that it will feel like no change has occurred.

 

I think it can feel easy to be discouraged when a change we desire is not occurring, or it seems slow, or stop and go. I think I have it right – I heard one time that most New Year’s resolutions or intentions will last an average of six weeks. So by this time of year, most people who had a certain goal or intention would’ve given up on or forgotten about it by now. It’s amazing how most of us are so unreliable and yet so predictable at the same time. Most of us have habits that are pretty predictable and yet when we try to make changes we can be remarkably unreliable, especially if the changes might be good for us. I’m not Tony Robbins, so I don’t have any inspiring tips on how to change your habits, but I think I have something to offer if you dare to accept it. It may not be helpful at all, but I find it helpful, so at least one other person might find it helpful. I think being unreliable as a species might be one of our greatest strengths. I know it seems maddening that we all seem to know what would be good for us as a planet and a species, but we just don’t seem to be able to consistently practice what is in our own best interest.

 

But there’s a strange and wonderful opportunity in that. If we can understand how unreliable we can be, perhaps we can quit relying on stories about ourselves and about each other that are harming us. If we can understand how unreliable any human is at some point, then perhaps we can give a bit more grace and forgiveness to each other. And I wonder if that might be the greatest love we can offer – that kind of grace and forgiveness. I know most of us want to be superheroes, or speaking for myself, I’ve definitely been seduced by the idea if I could just cultivate what is beneficial and let go of what is not, that would be really good. I’m slowly coming to the realization which I’m sure many of you have already come to – that perhaps the greatest power is not what we can control, and attempting to control ourselves, but learning what we can make use of, how we can use who we actually are (not who we thought we were), for the benefit of all of us.

 

We can learn to have confidence or faith in ourselves, even confidence in our unreliability and changeability. We can learn to trust that as part of us, and wonder how we can make use of that quality for others’ benefit, including our own. I think many of us are trained to think that we have certain strengths and certain drawbacks/deficiencies/growing edges. But I’m learning to take a more holistic approach – I think we bring all of us wherever we go. We bring the whole past with us, not just the nice parts. We bring all of it. We embody everything and everyone that has given rise to our being alive, all of it. And our actions are the actual seeds of the future being planted now. I think it’s good to plant all of ourselves here, where we are, all of it. It’s good I think to see ourselves as whole, nothing left out. It’s those kinds of people I put faith in, I put my trust in. Not the seemingly perfect or good people. I put my trust in the people who seem whole, people who are not afraid of their past, and who are able to be present. You all are supporting me in becoming that person. That’s the truth.

 

I have faith founded in experience that we shape each other in profound ways, sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, but always powerful ways. It’s kind of the secret of a place like this. We might think we come here to learn how to be, see, or feel a certain way. We might think we’re coming for encouragement or for inspiration. But the secret is just by showing up we naturally encourage each other. By being here we inspire without even trying or realizing it. We transform each other in ways that sometimes we notice, and often we don’t. But it happens. It happens just by you being here. By bringing your whole self, and realizing that yourself is just like the dust on the pews: you have a buoyancy, and you will rise. The funny thing is you may not even notice it. You might still be in a foul mood or feel like you’re tired or dragging, but a seed of confidence is planted. Confidence in the sky, confidence in the dust, confidence in our neighbor, confidence in ourselves. We don’t have confidence because any of these are completely reliable, they’re not.

 

We have confidence because they share a common trait – unreliability, and that shared trait makes them reliable, because they are just like us. We learn to place our confidence not in who we think we should be but in who we are: the vast sky, the dust whose nature is to rise, the person who dares to wonder who they are.

Topics: Self Worth