The Seed That Gets the Guinness Record

“HAVE FAITH as a grain of mustard seed”—perhaps the familiar exhortation merits further reflection.

The premise, and the promise, is that even the least amount of faith can move mountains or bring about the impossible.*

But what exactly is faith, and how is it mustered [sic]?

faith [< L. fides, confidence, belief < fidere, to trust]

Faith. The word’s etymology leads us back to the Latin verb fidere, meaning “to trust.” Plug that meaning—trust—into “have faith as a grain of mustard seed,” and it suggests that placing the merest modicum of trust in an outcome can harness enormous forces in one’s favor.

Exactly the kind of thing that contexts do.

And trust, a state of being, is a context rather than an event or an action. It’s a place to come from.

The proverb’s speaker hints (politely) that the listener may be unaware of coming from a certain place—operating in a state of being or a context—unlikely to lead to the desired outcome. The implied remedy is for the listener to do something unexpected—to effect a state change, to adopt a different place to come from—a new context—in order to reach what has otherwise seemed out of reach.

But how exactly does one get from a nothing to a something? from zero to sixty in one mustard seed?

What steps can take one from a state of “no faith” to a state of having “any amount of faith at all—however minuscule”?

By what means does one secure the initial starter seed—that necessary, all-important grain of faith—in the first place?

in • voke [< L. in-, in, on + vocare, to call < vox, voice]

An obvious method is simply to invoke that state of trust, to give it “voice” or “call it up,” whether physically or figuratively.

One type of “invocation” is offered by the “fake it till you make it” (“pretend it until it’s real,”  “say your affirmations”) school of thought. Such an invocation can work—but perhaps only to the degree that the effort it requires doesn’t simply get spent on reinforcing the current “no-faith” context—that is, result in a sort of plod-in-place (“Try not to think of a pink elephant”) stasis.

Another kind of “invocation,” an “as if” proposition, allows for a second, equally valid reality to coexist alongside the current one without challenging it, avoiding it, or warding it off. All that is needed here is to “voice” or “call up” in some way (see, hear, feel, imagine, or sense, etc., according to one’s preferred “wiring”) the desired endpoint condition—the “omega” counterpart to the “alpha” starting point—as if it were already manifested. Questions like What will it look like? feel like? be like? to have this fulfilled reality? can be useful here. Even a toe tickled in that endpoint experience allows a person to home in on the desired “where to come from” and tap into both conscious and unconscious resources.

context [L. contextus, a joining together < com-, together + texere, to weave]

Merely creating or accessing that endpoint state, in whatever limited degree, is sufficient—that simple action is itself the mustard seed.** It affords the experience of an “after” in which all the interim points on the timeline have already occurred. It’s like looking into the future as if it were the past.

A “leap of faith,” then, is really just a leap to a different outlook. It’s a simple contextual shift that takes but the blink of an eye:

Now you don’t see it, now you do.

Afternote: The Seed That Really Gets the Guinness Record

 

WHEN THIS OLD PROVERB was young, the seed of the mustard plant was indeed the tiniest known, at only about 1 to 2 mm in diameter. Today, though, that distinction goes to the dustlike scatter of the Brazilian orchid Gomesa crispa, named after the Portuguese physician/botanist Bernardino Antonio Gomes and bearing the Latin species identifier crispa, or curly.

Perhaps the saying should be updated, to “have faith as a mote of orchid seed.”

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*The universe has its laws and limits, of course, and everyone who subscribes to our shared reality already accords with them.

**Interestingly, the exhortation itself gets the listener halfway there. In order to have faith, one need only consider the idea presented (to “have faith”), because to make sense of the words, the listener must find the correlate (within his or her body of experience) and thus actually “run” the experience—much like running some lines of code.