PW: You are a respected author and teacher of Buddhist meditation. Why did you decide to write about faith?
SS: I think my fundamental theme has always been faith. But when I began Faith, I looked at my own life and my friends lives' and saw that the deepest question was, "What leads us on?" Also, I wanted to understand why it is that some people emerge from suffering as better people—more loving, more generous, more caring—while others seem to stop living. I knew that those who emerge with some greatness of heart seemed to have a certain quality of love for themselves and for life in all its complexity and difficulty.
PW: Your choice of subtitle is interesting: "Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience." Many of us have been educated to have faith in a power greater than ourselves.
SS: I don't mean to exclude extraordinary moments of feeling in the presence of God or absolute truth, but when you say "highest," there is a suggestion that we have to ascend up out of our lives. The word 'deepest' suggests that we can find the transcendent right in the midst of our ordinary experience.
PW: You suggest that trusting our own intuition, our inner sense of things, is an integral part of faith.
SS: It is. And especially in these uncertain times, it is so important to learn to look inside ourselves for what is lasting and what is steadfast.
PW: You tell us that we can base faith on the fact that things change. Yet, most people think of faith as protection from change.
SS: When we see that things change, we see that we, too, can change. We don't have to be mired in a pattern or a situation, thinking that it will always be this way. Faith has room to move us forward. We tend to think of faith as something that wisdom, or science, supercedes. But wisdom or insight show us that we are moving into the unknown at every moment. We can be living a wonderful life, and wisdom or insight will still reveal that we are not really in control of it. As we come to accept that, we can begin to look within, to draw on faith. The more clearly we see things as they are, the more faith we have.
PW: What are some of the other hallmarks of faith?
SS: I think the chief hallmark is a sense of connection to others—and a sense of connection to the whole of life. Faith is really about opening, and not just opening to suffering. People can have a great deal of trouble opening to pleasure and creativity and other joyful things.
PW: You describe how people can come to imagine that their pain is the most special and distinctive thing about them. We dream that our pain separates us from others, but it is actually a source of connection.
SS: Our culture conditions us to believe that suffering of any kind is shameful and should be hidden. But suffering is part of the nature of life. We're all vulnerable to it, and it is this vulnerability that connects us. That's not to suggest that life is all suffering. There is also great joy. But the situation keeps changing for all of us.
PW: You use some of the most painful events in your own life to reveal the workings of faith. Why did you decide to write such a personal book?
SS: I asked myself that. But I think of faith as the ability to get right in the center of what is possible. It is a movement that allows us to come forward, to offer our hearts without withholding. And I found that I had to do that in the writing of the book. I couldn't sideline myself.
