Trusting Life

My spiritual direction supervisor asked me recently, “What can you trust, right now?”

It’s a good question.

So much that many of us have trusted now feels untrustworthy. Systems we have assumed would always be in place are no longer assured. Laws we have counted on have been repealed or changed or ignored. Societal norms for behavior have shifted.

It’s important to note that our level of trust in those systems and laws and norms is influenced by our social location—our identities and how much privilege we do or do not carry in our society. Many marginalized people have been telling those of us, like me and many of you, who have a lot of privilege, for a very long time now that the systems were never trustworthy for them.

So for some of us, the loss of trust has felt like a rug being pulled out from under us; for others it has felt like a slow erosion of the solid ground we have been standing on; and for still others the trust was never there, or never certain, and now we are seeing others recognize that they, too, are on unstable ground.

Some of us may even find it hard to trust our own instincts. I know that I have said many times in the last few months that things I would once have considered completely paranoid are now entirely real, and yet I still find myself questioning that reality, thinking “surely this can’t all be happening.”

I actually think that’s part of the strategy of those seeking to destabilize our nation: to make us lose trust not only in our systems and in each other, but in ourselves.

Many of us are grappling with what to trust when trusting anything at all feels hard.

Sometimes, maybe, what we need is to go back to the basics. Back to the question my spiritual direction supervisor asked: “What can you trust, right now?” And back to the simplest answers to that question.

I can trust what I experience with my own senses: the colors of a sunset. The sound of the birdsong. The taste of fresh fruit. The smell of rain. The feel of a hand in mine.

I can trust what I know to be true, through both science and personal experience.

I trust that the sun will set tonight and rise tomorrow. (Whether or not it will be hidden behind clouds is a different matter.)

I trust that the moon and stars are in the sky whether or not I can see them at this moment.

I trust that birds will sing today, and based on recent experience, it seems likely that I can trust that I will see at least one bald eagle in flight on my commute.

I trust that soon, green grass will be growing in my currently brown yard.

I trust that if I take myself to a forest or a body of water, my anxiety about the human world will fade away for a while.

Joanna Macy calls the natural world the more-than-human world, instead of non-human—we are still part of it, not separate from it.

My attention was recently captured by this line from “Growing Trust” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: “I have fallen in love with life at a time when that might seem impossible.”

This might indeed feel like a time when falling in love with life seems impossible. There is so much about life right now that is neither lovable nor loving. And yet, I can and do regularly fall in love with life when I think of more-than-human life.

I fall in love with the eagle, the crocus, the rainbow, the sunset.

Sometimes it helps to look at the small scale—the everyday presence of life around us in its myriad forms.

And sometimes, when everything human-scaled may feel unsteady, untrustworthy to hold us, we need to zoom out, to look at the bigger—much bigger—picture.

As a thunderstorm rolled through a week ago, I trusted that whatever else happens, there will still be thunderstorms, and rain to wet the earth, and sometimes rainbows to give us joy.

When nothing else feels solid, the earth beneath my body is a stable foundation. Laying on the ground, facing the sky, I can feel the solidity of the earth and the spaciousness of the sky, and know I am held between the two. I trust gravity to keep on holding me to earth.

I trust the interdependent web of life to hold me even when everything else may feel like it’s falling apart. I imagine letting myself relax into that web of life, the way I might relax into a hammock. As I even imaging that, I feel some tension drain from my neck and shoulders. Can you imagine being held in a hammock or in the web of life, and feel a release of tension from wherever your body stores it?

I also trust Love (with a capital L), which is my favorite genderless name for the holy. I am grateful for a personal theology in which Love is steady and unconditional, present and available no matter what.

Years ago, I learned a simple, powerful song that speaks to this particular way of trusting life. The words were written as a meditation by Rev. Rebecca Parker, and then set to music by Elizabeth Norton.

There is a love holding me.

There is a love holding all that I love.

There is a love holding all.

I rest in this love.

There is a love holding us.

There is a love holding all that we love.

There is a love holding all.

We rest in this love.

(Recording and sheet music available here.)

We can rest in that love. We can trust that love, which is part of the web of life holding us all.

Even when things are unimaginably difficult, life and love are there, foundations on which we can rest.

I return to the solidity of earth, the promise of buds on the tree in our yard, the joy of eagles in flight, the delight of seeing downy cygnets swimming with the swan pair I sometimes see as I drive home from church on Sunday afternoons, the reliable presence of sun, moon, and stars in the sky day after day and night after night.

Maybe these are things you trust, too. Maybe your list has other things, small and large, in which you can still trust.

Whatever the details, may we be willing to trust life, and Love, all connected in an interdependent web of which each of us is a tiny but vital part.

Amen and blessed be.

This post was adapted from a sermon I preached at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Mankato on March 16, 2025.