Faith is a collage, words are a key

So for me, faith therefore resists being systematised and neatly packaged. I have described it as being a collage, a piecing together of memories, losses, gifts, hints, guesses, insights, blindness - the myriad experiences of human living, imagination, prayers and silence, all overlapping one another, even jostling with one another,but somehow building up a picture of God with its own integrity and ever eager to add another piece to the whole.

"I was originally a theologian," says a character in Peter Herg's novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - a remarkable character who can tell all about someone's past by simply listening to their voice. "I was originally a theologian. It is an excellent occupation for listening to people." Perhaps, then, we should have no orthodoxy but that of truth. The person of faith knows the need for a selfless respect for reality and for penitence before the God who is weaved within this reality. And as a person for whom the story and teachings of Christ are key to the collage, that is as a Christian, I dislike notions of the Church as a sort of fortress, protecting its own - too often comfortable and self-affirming - truth from the masses. I prefer to see myself as part of a conversational church and one that at the moment, I might add, I wish had a little more colour, humour and daring in the way it contributes to public debate and to our vocation to befriend the scapegoat.

Our spiritual search is for God as subject, not object. Faith has the nature of a relationship, then, not of a manifesto. It demands the patience, and often pain, of the very deepest relationship a human being can have. To be a person of faith is perhaps not so much to assume a position as to begin a process. A process that dislocates, reveals, transforms and, yes indeed, will need to express what it believes but will not blush at the thought of change a little later on. Faith seeks to enter the mystery of God rather than resolve it: "I greet him the days I meet him, I bless when I understand" wrote Manley Hopkins.

Faith involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis. Faith is unafraid to reason. It is unashamed to adore. It knows presence and absence because it is engaged in growth. So in Anne Michael's novel Fugitive Pieces a young man, Jacob, and an old man, Athos, are out walking in the hot Greek countryside:

We were discussing religion.
'But Athos, whether one believes or not has nothing to do with being a Jew. Let me put it this way, that truth doesn't care what we think of it'
We ascended the valley. The hills were scorched with sumac and sedge, cloudy with fraying thistles and milkweed. I could see patches of sweat darkening Athos's shirt.
'Maybe we should rest..'
'We are nearly at the top. Jacob, when Nikos died I asked my father if he believed in God.
How do we know there is a god?
Because he keeps disappearing.'

And a world that has a lot to live with, and little sense of what to live for, is one I believe that is again ready to ask what all this might mean.

In the West we seem so intent on spending money we don't have on things we don't want in order to impress people we don't like. This circle can break and reveal its own poverty. But hunger, spiritual hunger, can be a very dangerous thing; who knows where it might lead us? And the danger must be over the coming years that it is not so much that people will believe nothing as that they will believe anything and that, as Piers Brendon's superb history of the 1930s shows, that is to find oneself in a dark valley*.

* Brendon, Piers The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s Jonathan Cape, 2000
ISBN 0-224-06038-4

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