WOW Book Group - Fall 2024 Selection
Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience by Sharon Salzberg
Announcing the (newly revitalized) WOW Book Group!
It has been a few years since I organized a small group to read some anti-racism books, and now I’d like to read more books together and meet to discuss them.
We’ll start with Sharon Salzberg’s most personal book, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience. Originally published in 2002, I first read this little gem five years ago, and I found it to be inspirational, relatable, and practical. Well, that’s Sharon Salzberg for you.
She says that one of the reasons she wrote it was to reclaim the word “faith,” which is usually associated with religion in the U.S., especially far-right fundamentalism. But faith is so much more than that, and this book is a powerful memoir of how the author learned to trust herself and her spiritual path.
Salzberg’s website describes the book this way:
In this beautifully written work, one of America's most beloved meditation teachers offers discerning wisdom on understanding faith as a healing quality. Through the teachings of Buddha and insight gained from her lifelong spiritual quest, Sharon provides us with a road map for cultivating a feeling of peace that can be practiced by anyone of any tradition.
Faith. It's a word loaded with promise and controversy. It's a word often misunderstood. We're tried and tested, some days feeling that everything is right with the world, some days feeling lost and alone. Maybe we think that the innocent, lucky few have faith, and those more worldly couldn't possibly. Or, that we have to give up independence to attain it.
Stripping away negative conceptions that dismiss faith as being divisive or requiring blind adherence to a belief system, Sharon Salzberg offers discerning wisdom on understanding faith as a healing quality, a refuge that can be nurtured in us all. In her beautifully written book we find that faith is neither blind nor ignorant. Sharon shows how to combine devotion and the intellect to develop a genuine ease with ourselves and the world.
You can purchase the book from several sources listed here, as well as IndieBound. It’s an inexpensive paperback, about 200 pages, so it is not a long or difficult read.
Read it this month, and then meet online Sunday, November 10 to discuss, delve, and discern just what “faith” might mean for us at this time in our lives.
Please sign up below so we know you’ll be reading along and joining us for the discussion. (And so I can send you the Zoom link.)