(A friend reminded me
of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Blake: this conversation is hardly new. And in
France, “C’est la faute à Voltaire” is an old expression, probably as old as
the Revolution.)
The award-winning French daily La Croix, reporting on the current meeting at Lourdes of the French
Catholic Church’s bishops, mentioned how different the situation now is from
that of 50-100 years ago. Then, the problem was anticlericalism: the Church was
seen by many as the Enemy, to be reviled, resisted and refused. Now, on the
other hand, the problem is indifference.
After a month’s travelling in the
United States and Canada, and now returned to la République française, I find myself agreeing ruefully with this
statement. Quite apart from political situations and the public personæ driving
them – a play with strong characters, a chaotic plot and no visible playwright
– I see everywhere human situations of need, urgency, grief, pain and sorrow
that cry out for faith where no faith is.
Let me be clear. I do not mean that
faith is, in the simple and especially in the simplistic sense, the solution.
Where grief strikes or pain, faith will not make them go away. But faith will
let such moments, such events, be lived in another fashion, another context,
another dimension. Faith lets them be
lived in a context of prayer – perhaps even of rebellious and angry prayer, but
prayer: which means the context of a relation.
In a number of languages there exists a proverb like “A sorrow shared is a
sorrow halved”; and it is true that sharing a grief with a true friend lightens
the burden. Hence, might sharing it with the loving Father of All not lighten
it dramatically?
And yet when I look around me I
find that increasingly (and more perhaps in France than in America), having faith is looked upon benignly as an
idiosyncrasy, a hobby or what the French call une passion: X does old cars, Y collects stamps, Z does religion.
Doubtless such pursuits give X,Y, and Z profound satisfaction, but they are
best kept to oneself and not shared with (“forced on”) others. Faith is
emphatically not seen as something one needs,
still less something the world needs. One gets along perfectly well without it,
and looking at Islam gives one less than perfect sympathy for those who live by
it, let alone a desire to do so. At best, one is sometimes told, “Yes, well,
you have faith: I don’t. That’s just the way it is; sometimes I wish I had it,
but I just don’t.” End of subject. Faith, in other words, is something you have
or you don’t, like blue eyes: the condition, whether of having or lacking, is
definitive and beyond one’s control. And (it is intimated) much the best that
way.
What is one to answer to this? The
Church tells us, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly, that we must be disciples
and missionaries; but it carefully stops there. And all of us know that in the
fairly sophisticated and utterly indifferent world in which we live, move, and
have our being, trumpeting the Good News to one’s neighbours will be neither
welcome nor efficacious.
There is another way, also favoured
by the Church. Be merciful, it says; tirelessly do good to and for others; and
even without your mentioning your faith, people will start asking themselves and
others what on earth makes you tick? And that can be an opening into the
subject. Unfortunately, I have never
seen this happen in real life: the indifferent are not indifferent to good
works, but do not question their fons et
origo. “She is a truly good woman,” they will say; but they don’t ask what
makes her so.
On the other side of the picture
you have those who do have faith but give it a bad name. These are to be found
in many denominations, from Pentecostal to Roman Catholic. They are absolutely
sure of their dogma, which they use as a sledge-hammer to beat their opponents
with. They relish combat because it is, as they see it, for Christ. In analogy
with “Islamists” I call them Christianists.
They do untold harm. They insult and injure for Christ; they threaten and
malign for Christ; and sometimes they kill for Christ and gleefully urge their
government to do so. They create scornful atheists wherever they go.
So those of us who have faith --
though never enough: “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief” – faith riddled
with doubt, faith skating on uncertainty – walk very quietly on the whole,
between the Christianist cannon on the one hand and the Indifferent desert on
the other, hoping against hope that somehow, sometime, God will do something -- appear on CNN, call Time, throw Kremlin,
Tienanmen and White House into the ocean and declare Playtime Over. When
disaster happens – Irma, Maria, terrorist attacks, high-rise fires – we react
with surprising and touching kindness and even, sometimes, efficiency; but overall we don’t give the
impression of believing that faith and prayer are either essential or a Good
Thing in this world.
Perhaps we need to feel more
confident. Perhaps we need to stop confusing attitudes to religion with
attitudes to sex. Perhaps we need to speak up more. Not to yank others by the
shirtfront and yell at them, but to tell the world that we are eyewitnesses –
not to that Event two millennia ago, but to the mercies, the spiritual gifts,
the joy even in grief, that we personally have received. Eyewitnesses to the
good that intelligent charity, discerningly directed love, does. Eyewitnesses to
the evil that humiliation brings, whether humiliation of persons or of
countries.
After all, those of us old enough
to remember the falling of the Berlin Wall know that we had a chance to turn
with discernment and charity to Russia and to one Vladimir Putin, and we threw
it away. Our great-grandparents had a chance to turn with discernment and
charity to a defeated Germany in 1918 and instead gave it the Treaty of
Versailles. Even today, we have the chance to approach with discernment,
charity and brotherhood the millions of young Iranians who look to us and their
sometimes approachable government; we perhaps have a tiny chance left to
approach that strange young man in Pyongyang to deal with him without naiveté
but without humiliation.
And always, always, the basic force
that moves our world – our micro-world and our macro-world – is prayer. With
prayer, anything is possible. Without it, nothing profound or lasting is. Shit
still happens; God does not micromanage; but we need not be helpless in the
face of it.
