By Amanda Star Kingsley

I used to cringe when I heard the word “faith”. 

Raised a white woman in a small, predominantly white community, “faith” to me meant “God”, and “God” meant a little white church with peeling paint, an aroma of stale age, and creepy dark images that hid secrets I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know about. Faith seemed directly connected to religion, and from a very young age I was skeptical of religion. 

But beyond my skepticism was the calling of curiosity. I wanted to know what happened every Sunday when my friends followed the call of the bells and  attended a service. I wanted to know what secrets, my own family was “keeping from me”.  I wanted “in”, or at least the option to be “in”. 

My parents were raised and Catholic, educated by nuns and priests. They knew religion in a way I never would, and they opted “out” in raising us. It wasn’t because they didn’t believe in God, but I like to think looking back, it was because they believed in more than God, more than one way, more than one voice. They weren’t opposed to gifting us the opportunity to dabble in religion. During my childhood I tried a few belief systems on: Catholic Mass with my best friend, Sunday School at the Baptist church in my neighborhood, Youth group at the community church. 

I admired the connection in religious communities, but never felt like I belonged. For me religion was something to do, not something to embody. The people were nice enough, but the energy was stiff, reserved, resistant. It felt like everyone was playing by someone else’s made up rules, but no one knew exactly who made them up. Following suit was learned and accepted. Do what you're told, and we welcome you, break the rules and we outcast you. To fit “in” you must follow. 

Not by anyone’s lead but my own, I learned that faith meant following, and following felt like fear. Religion wasn’t for me, and so I assumed by nature that faith wasn’t for me. 

I wanted what “they” had: community, guidance, support, something bigger than what could be seen with my human eye, but I didn’t want to pay the price I inferred that they had paid to get it. It seemed to me that “faith”meant dependence on something outside of oneself. It came with a loyalty to God before self.  From my perspective, to have faith was to sacrifice one’s inner knowing to the knowing of a one true God. To have faith was to accept that someone else was in control, and your job was to step into line. Autonomy lost. Intuition set aside.

At just about thirty years of age I found Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and my journey to “faith” began to take shape. It was slow and steady, but through the teachings of Tolle, Chopra, Hicks, and many others I started to understand myself and the “something bigger” I’d been longing to discover. It wasn’t a conscious shift, but I was beginning to find faith. Not in a church or in a book of scripture, but from within, and from beyond. My perspective was shifting; the world was starting to look and feel a little different.

Then I had an abortion. 

I was thirty-eight years old, three beautiful children, and a loving and supportive husband. I didn’t expect to find faith in an unplanned pregnancy, but that’s where it found me. My world had been turned upside down and everything I’d ever believed came into question. In the chaos, and through the tears, “faith” started to make sense in a way it had never had made sense to me before. 

My desire to believe in something bigger than me came to full fruition in the form of an unplanned pregnancy. Never had I felt so alone, yet never had I felt so held. The activity within my womb opened doors to places in my soul I had never before been able to access. For the first time ever I was faced with the necessity of leaning into my inner truth, and the more I leaned in, the more I realized I wasn’t alone at all. 

There wasn’t a human being or  belief system on the planet who could have brought me the faith I found when I chose abortion. With life beginning in my womb, and life evolving in my heart I was faced with the reality that the right thing to do wasn’t always the easy thing to do. There was a voice whispering all around me, “Abortion is a part of your story, step in not away.” Faith asked me to listen to a voice whose face I could not place, whose origin I could not pinpoint, whose wisdom I could not explain. Faith said, “Love chooses abortion. Love can experience grief and relief at the same time. Love can navigate what’s hard with a faith that it’s right.” 

Faith asked me to leap into the unknown and it held my hand until I landed softly into my new reality. I became a woman who had chosen abortion. I became one of the one in four. I had made a human choice through the superhuman power of faith. 

Abortion cracked me open. It showed me that the community, guidance, and support, I’d longed to find in religion was with and around me all along. God wasn’t an individual, I didn’t need to follow a pastor, or sit in pews to learn his ways. God was an energy, expressed through all kinds of experiences and accessed through faith.

Unplanned pregnancy felt like darkness until I accessed the light of faith. I still don’t have the words to explain it, but something much bigger than my human form is at play, and once you’ve felt that, there’s no going back. 

Listen to Amanda Star Kingsley’s podcast Speaking Light Into Abortion.