Faith
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
"Years back, I was up in the Bay Area, and I was going to be giving a Dhamma talk. And there was one woman who’d just come through a stroke. So I wanted to make sure that I gave a Dhamma talk that would be helpful to her. I asked her, “What would you like to hear tonight?” And she said, “I’d like to hear a talk on faith.” And something inside me had a sinking feeling because I knew everybody else in the room was not going to want to hear about faith.
But I posed the question at the beginning of the talk, “I’d like to see a show of hands for how many in the room here do you find that in every day in every way your practice is getting better and better.” There were no hands of course. So I said, “What do you do to see you through those fallow periods? You’ve got to have some faith in what you’re doing to stick with it.”
Then I continued with my talk. Nobody in the room seemed to like the talk, but the woman for whom it was aimed really appreciated it, she drunk it in, because she needed it. Here she was, stricken by a stroke.
This was relatively late in her life and she was going to have to fight her way back. And she did.
So it’s through faith that we overcome difficulties, through faith that we overcome the ups and downs of the practice, the ups and downs of our own personal lives, and the ups and downs of the society we’re in.
You want this to be the dominant quality, you want this to define you and to define your sense of the world."
Faith
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Published/Meditations9/170408Faith.pdf
29th November, 2022
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