The Gospel According to Pigeon

Jesus and Peter on the Water by Gustave Brionn (1867)

Since my deconstruction of my belief systems began in 2012, I have made peace with most of the words associated with organized religion: belief, grace, hope, forgiveness, repentance, wisdom, and even Jesus himself. For each of these words, I created a deeper understanding, and often my own definition.

Except for the word and concept of faith. The cult-like denomination I was immersed in used faith as a synonym for obedience. And I disdain the idea of obedience to a system is an enmity to the True Self. So I avoided examining it - even to the point of considering it to be a relic of my church days.

Then the word “faith” started showing up in unexpected ways. In a session with my therapist, in conversations with friends, including one who had his own discomfort with the standard definition for faith.

I learned a long time ago to pay attention to patterns, so I began examining faith.

My work began with going back to the beginning of humans. Through anthropology and art, I am quite certain that spirituality is integrated into the human experience. Every ancient culture had spiritual beliefs. The more atheistic scientists believe it is an evolutionary coping mechanism that is designed to keep the neocortex from shutting down from the overwhelm of uncertainty, thus creating more capacity for survival skills like problem solving. That may be true, but further examination shows that ancient peoples had far more sophisticated belief systems than just coping mechanisms.

Comanches, Polynesians, and Vikings

Among Polynesian and Melanesian peoples, “mana” describes the impersonal cosmic force that concentrates in persons through direct encounter, vision, and lived practice.

Among the Comanche and other Southern Plains peoples, “puha” was their word for the inner authority a warrior received through vision quest — days of fasting and solitude until a guardian spirit revealed itself, conferring songs, knowledge, and the power to act from interior knowing rather than from skill or circumstances.

The Norse tradition called this “trú” - trust, confidence, reliance in the gods. A Viking’s trú was built on relationship and reputation, not guarantees. Norse spiritual confidence was not confidence that suffering would be removed. Norse spiritual confidence was the willingness to stand firm alongside gods and kin regardless of how the battle ended — fatalism and courage as a single compound word.

Mana, puha, trú: three traditions in different corners of the planet, but with one common understanding: spiritual confidence is relational, embodied, and intrinsic. You prove the depth of your faith by how you act. The force lives inside the person as ontological truth, not an institutional reward. And this concept of “personal power” is radically and heretically different from the most common definition of faith that came from the Apostle Paul.

Paul vs Jesus

Paul used the Greek word “pistis” (trust, allegiance, fidelity) to describe faith. Fr0m his perspective of trying to start a religion that was an extension of Judaism, faith was relational and covenantal; measured by loyalty to Christ in both rote and doctrine. To him faith was proof of worthiness for the dispensation of “The Spirit”. Sacred power lived outside the self, in a promissory structure the self must continuously honor to maintain. It was with this definition that I was indoctrinated with. Faith could be lost by disobeying the doctrine of the Church. That is why it was common phrasing to say “She left the Faith” or “he lost his faith”.

Church orthodoxy moved the locus of sacred power further outward still into sacrament, clergy, and creedal assent. The great gnostic teacher, Evelyn Underhill, named this as the defining institutional corruption of Christianity: the substitution of religious structures instead of the direct experience of the divine.

She studied every major mystic in the Christian tradition — Eckhart, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Ruysbroeck — and found the same thing in all of them: faith is awakened by direct interior contact with the Divine.

"Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality."
— Evelyn Underhill

Interestingly, her definition of faith was much more aligned with the Jesus’ definition than with Paul’s.

Jesus taught that faith was a sacred power already inside the seeker. In Luke 17:21, the kingdom of God is declared “entos hymon” meaning “within you, among you”. In Mark, healing after healing is attributed to something already imbued in the seeker: “your faith has made you whole”. When Jesus rebuked his disciples for having “little faith”, the Greek word is “oligopistos” used not “pisitis”. Oligopistos means stunted or shrunken trust. It was a diagnostic observation of something they already had, not a condemnation of what they didn’t have. Like I said, quite different than what Paul taught, and much closer to the ideas of mana, puha, or trú.

The Pigeon

Early one recent morning, I was sitting on the balcony with the doors open, pondering this question of faith in the silence. I must have been very still, because a pigeon landed on the railing and stayed for a full minute. Then I made a slight movement.

He did not fly away. He jumped.

No identity crisis about what kind of bird he was. No imposter syndrome about his qualifications for flight. No self-doubt. No need to reference a user manual. What theologians, philosophers, and mystics wrote books about he lived every day.

This locked in my sense of what faith is for me: it is the human version of knowing you have wings.

"You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?"
— Rumi

Re-Defining Faith

What I discovered is that faith is intrinsic. It is part of the soul and the True Self, requiring awakening and rather than dispensation. It is an inner confidence in your own power, proven through action rather than declared through belief. It operates as spiritual intelligence, which means trusting your intuition as a legitimate form of knowing. It is relational and interconnected; an interior experience that extends outward, consistent with what quantum theory describes about the nature of connection itself.

The mystical traditions mapped by Underhill, the indigenous cosmologies encoded in puha and mana, and the radical interiority of the Synoptic Jesus all converge on a single claim: there exists, within each person, a power so fundamental that it precedes, survives, and ultimately exceeds every external system built to name, manage, or negate it.

Now that is a powerful definition of faith! But is faith even the right word?

The English word “faith” has too many institutional fingerprints on it. It is too tainted by abuse and mis-use. And it is far too limiting for what I discovered. So I turned to Spanish to find a word that summarized this idea of inner power.

The word I discovered is “invencibilidad”.

Invencibilidad derives from the Latin word “vincere”: to conquer, to overcome because of something indefatigable inside you. It aligns with the idea that faith is an intrinsic, ontological force within the self that deepens through direct confrontation with the Divine and with reality. It requires no external validation to exist and remains intact regardless of outside forces or conditions.

Evelyn Underhill borrowed the dark night of the soul from John of the Cross to describe exactly this: the apparent dissolution of the self as the precondition for contact with what in the self is indestructible. You do not reach invencibilidad by avoiding the storm. You reach invencibilidad by discovering inside the storm what Peter very briefly discovered when he walked on water: there is a part of you that can not fail, can not drown.

My partner, Dr. Virginia Lacayo, uses the Spanish word “Indomable” (meaning untamable, unconquerable) to describe the quality of consciousness required to lead inside uncertainty and complexity. Invencibilidad is the spiritual root of Indomable consciousness. The leader who operates from an Indomable mindset does so because somewhere in their inner being, they located the spiritual part of themselves that could not be colonized by fear in any form. A person grounded in invencibilidad does not extract value from others to stabilize their own sense of self. A person grounded in invencibilidad becomes, instead, a source of faith for others.

Faith and Modern Life

Let me address the skeptics reading this. As systems and institutions crumble under intense change, what most of us counted on to be solid is shockingly not. The organizational frameworks, the political structures, the professional identities, the cultural certainties, all of it is shifting or outright dissolving. This is way more than a period of temporary instability. This is the reality you are now being asked to lead in.

"Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty."
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Inside that reality, invencibilidad is a leadership requirement, especially for two specific situations:

• When the terror is real. When you go beyond existential fear to the sudden awareness that everything you thought was true no longer works, and what you believed was solid turned out to be an illusion. This is when invencibilidad is most necessary. Every belief system, every identity, every framework that failed was something you adopted, inherited, or built from the outside in. Your deepest self — your True Self — predates all of it. It did not come from your résumé, your relationships, your theology, or your track record. It cannot collapse because it was never constructed in the first place.
  

• When progress looks and feels like failure. When you have done everything right but are not yet seeing the results. When your ego is losing confidence and telling you that you are foolish. When other people are telling you to suspend your convictions and play it safe. This is when invencibilidad is most necessary. Your judgment, your vision, your capacity to stay the course; none of those come from the evidence in front of you. It comes from the self beneath the doubt.

The pigeon did not deliberate. He did not consult his doubts or audit his capabilities or wait for better conditions. He jumped because he knew what he was. That knowledge had nothing to do with the wind speed, the height of the railing, or what had happened the last time he flew. It was knowledge of his own nature; specific, accurate, and completely indifferent to circumstance.

As a human, you are cursed with consciousness. But you still have what the Norseman took into battle, what the Comanche warrior put his trust in, what Peter had when he first stepped out of the boat. You have the same interior force. You don’t need to find it. You just need to trust it.