What you value about your Faith

Philip Harvey

Words written in response to the invitation “What you value about your faith.”

Well, first I grew up in a world where faith was shown to me, given to me. So it’s not as though faith is just some kind of thing, a skill or talent, like musical ability or a flair for languages, that you either have or you don’t. Faith has been lived out around me my whole life in other people’s lives. So it is observable, as well as experienced personally.

One has to be careful in making easy claims for faith: often faith happens when all grounds for faith have been removed. Like hope and love, faith is still there when all reason for it may have been negated.

For me, faith is the constant proof that there is something more than current explanations for living. I find the creed, for example, and when of this mind, not a set of final absolute statements but a whole series of ways into new meaning. The statements are less doctrines than clues as to how faith can make meaning.

To say I have faith in these words of the creed is not the same as saying I believe in them. We can and do believe “ten thousand things” (as the Chinese say), but that doesn’t mean we have faith in them. I may believe in most of the discoveries of science, that doesn’t mean I have faith in science. The faith we put in the realities enunciated in the creed goes beyond explanations.

Faith is turning me again away from distraction and noise. Not only is it easy to go after the everyday sensations of life, the drive is there to pursue them to the exclusion of all else, including faith, hope, and love. This pursuit fills my days with temporary gratifications, with all the little things I shore up to distract me from truth. It is a short-lived belief in Me and the passing show, whereas faith is about the truth that is more than Me, more than throwaway explanations and hasty cures.

There is no doubt that faith remains even when reasons for faith have been attacked and even seemingly demolished. Nowadays some would call this adaptation to changed circumstances. Maybe it is. Certainly the ability to find new ways of dealing with life after catastrophe or loss or just plain indifference is a remarkable human ability. Not everyone seems to have this ability, others have it in abundance throughout their lives. Is it something we learn? Where does it come from? Simple faith in possibility is itself a gift. The faith though that (to get poetic) “moves mountains” and is (to use Christian language) the resurrection, this kind of faith might start with nothing. It is being declared as a way forward, against all the odds. Even just to have such a faith as a possibility is an extraordinarily valuable invitation, and its comes from outside ourselves, there for us to try and understand, there to take up.

At other times I ask, What is faith? In arid times, or times of stress or conflict or turmoil,  I will be left with only questions. Like, What is faith? Times of doubt, times when the only certainty is uncertainty, can cause one to question everything altogether. One can understand why others give it away, or simply see no point, or seek permanently after distraction and impermanence, materiality and power, as replacements for faith. But at such times there is only one thing really that can be done, other than seeking help where it may be found, and that is to ask after that which is unknown, which is beyond all these states of turmoil and emptiness.

It is in this state that Christ’s promises, and Christ himself, become the great value. We would give up everything for the pearl of great price. We would follow him to Jerusalem, unready for the consequences, although we think ourselves ready.

Then there is the second sense of the word ‘faith’, as religion or religions, in the way we talk about great faiths of the world. These are all to be valued. Christianity, for example, is a faith of outward show as well as inward life, a faith of history, a faith across cities and continents where its manifestations are culturally complex and ancient. As a reminder and a means to personal faith, it is of inexpressible value. As simple spectacle with a price tag, it is of no more value than the ten thousand other distractions of this world.

In his own retreat summary, Bishop Graeme Rutherford used words that helped further with my understanding of the value I put on faith. Christianity keeps on working as a whole worldview that can be put to the test, he said. This is certainly the case. By keeping to faith we see existence clearly, new ways of seeing the world are explained. Faith keeps on giving, it renews and is renewed. I was saying similar things when I wrote that faith is the constant proof that there is something more than current explanations for living. I am sometimes amazed at how that testing happens, and how faith is not wanting.

He placed emphasis on how faith teaches us to see the wonder of the world. It gives us a new way of seeing the world. This, I have to say, is something I take so much as a given about faith that I did not think to include it in my evolving page of values, when in fact it is at the core of the creative act and the motive and object of so much creative work.

But faith, he said, is a way of living involving decisions and actions. We can think about all sorts of things, can view the whole of existence from a vantage point, but life itself and faith is out there “on the road”, being and doing. Certainly this is a central truth of my life of faith. It is one I value, simply for a start, because it is give  freely and is a freedom to use wisely.

Words written in response to the invitation from Bishop Graeme Rutherford, “What you value about your faith.” This invitation came as part of a St Peter’s Eastern Hill parish retreat held this weekend at Pallotti College near Millgrove in Victoria.