Where has all the faith gone?

It is not particularly surprising to ask such a question at this time. As a faith community we are meant to lead the way in terms of faith. This is after all what we proclaim to do as a community.. have FAITH! Yet, this is perhaps the one thing we tend to struggle with on a constant basis as it is asking us to place our whole being into an unknown. If we look at Jeremiah (17.5-10) we can see God saying something along the lines of: Have faith in me and you will grow like a tree beside life giving waters, if you do not you will be similar to a tree in the middle of a harsh desert. A similar theme is struck in Psalm 1. The early Christians also struggled with belief and faith but I suspect for different reasons (1 Cor 15.12-20).

Today faith and belief are not well known commodities, at least not in the esoteric sense. Faith and belief actually imbue our culture and our times but in a very different manner to what we think of within our Christian sensibilities. We actually have an undying faith in science and scientific progress, we have a strong faith in economic progress (whatever that may mean) and above all we have an absolute faith in everything technological. We have left behind us any thought of the nebulous faith that is associated with, well, faith. We are so concerned with what our rationality can undertake that we forget the other side of ourselves. One of our major issues in society today is that of mental health. I do not know but I suspect there is a correlation between our ability to sustain faith and our ability to retain our mental composure in the light of change. The world is changing rapidly and often which leads us towards an inability to integrate the things that are happening around us. We are so driven by our faith in things that are physical or rational that we do not cater for the needs of the other side of our own being.

It looks good but sometimes too much of a good thing is not good

In the Lukan beatitudes Christ puts the two sides of our being into perspective (Lk.6.17-26). Both the negative and the positive, the up and the down. Unfortunately today we look only to the one side, always looking for the up, never recognising that there is a down that corresponds. It is the integration of the two that brings us to Christ because it brings us to a wholeness of being. We cannot have one without the other. Any person who is involved in recovery or involved in bringing others out of pain know that for this to happen both the negative and the positive need to be embraced. IF we are unable to uderstand the flip side we are unable to understand ourselves. In order for us to maintain our faith we need to overthrow our faith. That sounds weird. In reality it is not we have a dependency on a faith with regards to the rational often as a result we find we have no place to turn to other than into disturbance and illness. If we overthrow this and move into the madness of faith in something other than the rational we find our equilibrium and begin to understand ourselves.

In beginning to understand ourselves we can see both sides of the equation, as it were, and are able to accept who we are. We begin to love ourselves. In this acceptance we are able to see the other not as other but as part of ourselves and are therefore able to begin to love our neighbour as ourselves. We begin to have faith in Christ and all the extraordinary claims that come with that faith because they are extraordinary. Like the tree in Psalm 1 that is beside the water we need to have an eye on the waters of faith and the dry country of rationality in order for us to become whole. It is not this or that it is rather both this and that.