Faith is Not Seeing Past the Veil

By Braddon Damien White

I was out of the pool, showered, still a little warm from the water, waiting for my spouse to get home. And in that in-between stretch of evening — nothing urgent, nothing demanding my attention — my mind went to something I’d written in a reflection not long before: that I scatter my resonance in my own way. These essays. The stories I hope to finish one day. The small, ordinary offerings I keep making as I follow my own soul’s thread through this life.

And I started thinking about how differently that scattering looks for everyone else.

Not everyone resonates through writing, or through the same passions and projects I chase. Sometimes resonance finds you through someone who shares none of your interests at all — no hobbies in common, no shared work, nothing you’d point to on paper. And yet something underneath it all threads together anyway, in a rhythm that has nothing to do with what you’re doing and everything to do with who you are.

That’s why I don’t think a perfect map exists for anyone’s journey. Everything that goes into a life — every relationship, every setback, every unexpected opening — is unique to the soul living it. The specific experience each of us is having here, inside this one mortal life, is what our own Celestial Soul sought out. With the Veil of Purposeful Forgetting fully in place. On purpose.

Life can be hard. We fall. Sometimes falling is the only constant for a season. And then, without warning, a path opens that we never thought possible. We don’t always know the point of it while we’re living it. We don’t know the destination. But if we’ve done the quiet work — if we’ve built some real attunement with our own soul, the same soul still anchored in the Celestial Realm the whole time — then somehow we find ourselves able to make the choices in front of us. To know, at least a little, which way to go.

Religions talk about faith constantly. Faith in God. Faith in this teaching, that promise, this book. And I sat with that for a while, because I wanted to know what I actually meant when I used the word “faith” for Transient Harmony. So I went to the root of it.

The dictionary gives you the surface: strong belief, trust without full proof. But the actual word — faith — comes from the Latin fides, and further back, from an old root meaning “to trust, to be persuaded, to abide.” That word “abide” stopped me. Some etymologists trace it to that very same ancient root as faith — the notion of “to await trustingly.” Not passive waiting. Not indifference. A waiting that already trusts the outcome before it arrives.

I looked at the neighboring words too, because I wanted to be precise about what I don’t mean. Belief traces back to a root about holding something dear — love, fondness, an affection for an idea that makes you want it to be true. That’s not quite it. Trust traces to a root meaning firm, solid, steadfast — something you can stand on, unmoving. Close, but still not quite it. Allegiance and duty both trace to obligation — something owed, a debt, a bond to someone above you who could call it in. That’s the furthest thing from what I mean. There is no one above me collecting on a debt. No sovereign I owe anything to.

What I mean is closer to abiding.

The Celestial Soul is not separate from me, giving orders from somewhere I can’t reach. It is me, at a wider vantage — the same awareness that, before this mortal life ever began, looked at the whole arc of this Mortal Life String and knew it, simply, as its own. Not the granular detail. Not each specific Tuesday or each specific grief. Those belong to the Mortal Self, to be lived and discovered as they come, exactly the way the Veil intends. But the shape of it — the resonance and the dissonance woven through the whole of it — my soul saw that too, and answered into it.

So when I talk about faith, I’m not asking anyone to trust something distant and unprovable. I’m asking them to abide in a decision that was already made, with full sight, by the fuller version of themselves. Not faith in a book. Not faith in a god outside of us. Faith in our own soul, to its deepest core.

That is, I think, the most difficult kind of faith to hold — and somehow the easiest to reach for, because no one else is required to make it real. No one to convince. No one to wait on. Just the soul that has been with you this whole time, still here, still anchored, still trusting the shape of the life it already knew as its own.

I think of the word abide the way I’ve heard it sung — slow, unhurried, carrying that particular calm that doesn’t come from nothing being wrong, but from something steady underneath everything that is. That’s the feeling I want faith to carry in Transient Harmony. Not relief from hardship. Not a promise that the falling will stop. Just a steadiness available underneath it, the whole time, whether we reach for it or not.

Living the Question

Where in my life right now am I asking to see past the veil, instead of learning to abide within it?
What would it feel like to trust the version of myself that already saw the whole shape of this experience — and knew it as its own?
When I imagine the calm of true abiding, where in my body or my day do I already feel a trace of it?
What am I currently treating as a debt to be paid, that might actually only ever have been an invitation to trust?