Eleventh Sunday of 1997

We walk by faith and not by sight

As a unifying point for these three readings, I’d like to suggest a word from Paul’s Letter to the Christians at Corinth when he says: "We walk by faith and not by sight." I think it is possible to put all these three readings together under the rubric of Faith. In fact it is extremely useful to do that because I think it illumines what faith is about.

Perhaps you grew up, as I did, with faith being a set of answers, somewhat like the multiplication table, You memorised all these answers and you carried them well in hand through life and that’s all there was to it... There was a sort of static and completed quality to Faith. Why it was handled this way is clear: it is one of the many bitter fruits of the Protestant Reform. When Luther and the Roman Bureaucrats were fighting each other over what precisely faith was about, there were excesses and exaggerations on either side, as often happens in that kind of brawling atmosphere. The great mistake that we made was to, in a sense, objectify faith. We turned it into a set of propositions and answers, a kind of cognitive system which could be achieved and held in place, untouched, through life.

What these three readings provide is a much more Biblical sense of what faith is. It is not just something cognitive. It is, in a sense, life, and it is coterminal with life. It is simply what we think life ought to be, namely, that we ought not be driven by the instinct of self-preservation. It seems to me that that is what comes out when looking at the model of Jesus. We ought to be able to, sooner or later, with the grace of God, transcend our egocentricity. We ought to be able to form a human community on the basis of all that. And this it seems to me is what the Biblical understanding of what faith is and what faith does and how we are believers. In other words it is an existentialized, or temporalized faith, and this is really important. Faith then takes on a dramatic and dynamic character. It is not an answer held safely once and for all, but rather it is the intimation of a vision that constantly goes through revision as we go through life.

Let me give a simple little example in the figure of Elie Wiesel, to take a non-Christian. Elie Wiesel of course is the Nobel Prize winner for literature... who as a thirteen year-old boy of a little Romanian shtetl goes with his family into Dachau as an ardent Orthodox Jew and comes out, after the death of his family and everybody else, an atheist. He then later, returns to his Judaism... All of this is of course chronicled in his many novels. Is the God of Elie Wiesel the same God before Auschwitz as it was after Auschwitz? Clearly not... This is offered in an attempt to try and fill in the contrast I am trying to make between faith as a set of answers and faith as life, faith as attentiveness to a vision, faith as fidelity, faith as faithfulness to a vision which essentially must be spread out over time if it is to be properly human.

The great Newman whose text we sang a couple of minutes ago said that to become perfect is to change often... And so I think this is extremely important because this flies absolutely in the face of the way in which I think our lives are normally geared, and I use the word "geared" intentionally. We are "geared" like the things in a watch or a car. To put it another way, what determines our sense of the pace of life and how time moves? We joke about "Caribbean Time," or "African Time," or "Jewish Standard Time"... We say that those people are never "on time," they are always late. And it’s true; they are always late... The reason why they are always late is extremely simple: they are not mechanically geared, as we are, so that I and perhaps you feel very often like something that is being driven. Life is not something I do, rather it is something that is done to me. The whole world and a whole set a causal patterns are mechanically determined, and now we’ve got electromagnetism and computers which have simply accelerated the whole causal pattern. I really think this functions as a model for how we think things ought to happen, and above all the rate at which we think things ought to happen. There are all kinds of problems with our understanding of efficiency, about which I tried to say a few things a couple of weeks ago, and above all with the pace at which we think things ought to happen and the rate of the results which we think ought to occur. For one thing, we have the illusion of being in charge: "I made the machine, I set up the schedule..." But the machine is now making me... But we still have the sense of absolute mastery.

Faith says: no, I live in dialogue with that mysterious Other and I cannot call all the shots. That’s very important. In other words, although we can’t all be Luddites, even if I think I am by temperament a Luddite, I think we should and must, if we are to be human, operate on multiple schedules, and some schedules are more significant and should be more determinative of who we are and how we operate than others. No, it is not very simple. In fact, it is extraordinarily difficult because I don’t even advert to this prior to going over these readings and fretting over what they might deliver to me and, I hope, to you. Patience, the capacity to wait, and the capacity to waste time are all negative things for us: "You don’t waste time, by God," "time is money" or "I’ve been in this bank line for seven and a half minutes, I shouldn’t be here for so long..." Everything else in my life gets organised along the same lines. That’s the first thing that has to do with faith.

To believe is to be ready to radically realign my sense of the pace at which things ought to occur in my life. But it is more than that because concomitant with that kind of mechanisation of life is a sort of enlightenment view of clarity and rationality and reasonableness about the way things ought to happen which also gets extrapolated onto every detail of our lives. Of course this is embodied in the same notion of faith as propositional: "I know the answer, God is triune: Father, Son , and Holy Spirit..." There you are. "I am made to know Him, love Him, serve Him and be happy in this world so that I may know and love Him in the next..." It is all so simple. No, no, no... The problem is: what does it mean to know him? What does it mean to be happy? What does it mean to believe? We would like to assume that we know all this beforehand rather than having to discover it bit by bit and be willing to be led by that "kindly light" that we sang about. In other words, to believe is to, again to take a leaf from our friend Newman, be at least moderately content that one step is enough for me.

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RT 22/5/97