The nuts and bolts of faith

The Very Rev Dr John Chalmers reflects on the importance of ritual in keeping faith alive.

WHAT keeps faith and hope alive when everything that is happening in your life or around about you challenges every fibre of your belief?

A recent visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau was a stark reminder that humanity is capable of indescribable evil, but strangely it was also a reminder that faith and hope can endure the most horrific circumstances. Through more than 3000 years of history the Jewish people have been tested by exile, persecution and discrimination to the point that industrial scale killing was put in place in order to wipe a whole people off the face of the earth; yet, the faith and the hope of the Jewish people has endured.

There is a famous story, now not considered to be apocryphal, of the Rabbis who, in the awful circumstances of Auschwitz, decided one late night to put God, in absentia, on trial. After due pleadings God was found guilty of, among other things, abandoning God’s people. Then, this same court of Rabbis rose from their sitting and together went off to say their prayers.

The question is - how did the Jewish people keep their faith and hope alive in such times? How, as the Psalmist asks in Psalm 137, did they manage to keep on singing, “the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

I think that one of the reasons lies in the portability of their faith.

Ancient people gathering around a totem pole, inventions of religious practice centred on one place and religious personality cults - don’t survive the test of time. The totem poles eventually rot and fall to the ground. If, almost 600 years before the birth of Jesus, the faith of the ancient Jews had depended solely on the existence of Solomon’s Temple, they would have been assimilated into the religious practices of the Babylonians and Judaism would have been no more. Religions based on the cult of personality hardly ever outlast their founder and never survive when people discover that their founders have feet of clay.

However, faith which is based on inner conviction and religious traditions which root people in a regular routine and ritual that can be activated anywhere – these will take root and grow, these will survive the worst catastrophes.

Centuries of ritual, stories passed on from generation to generation and an inner conviction born of understanding the ebb and flow of history have kept the Jewish people faithful, even when there was no reason left to be faithful. A ritual, a daily ceremony, the observance of a custom, the memory invoked by a sacred place or by a sacred moment where our life changed forever – these are the nuts and bolts that keep faith and hope alive.

In the face of the tensions that abound in the world today and against the cataclysmic potential of the climate crisis, there has, perhaps, never been a more pressing need to have ways in which we keep the candle of faith and hope burning.

"How, as the Psalmist asks in Psalm 137, did they manage to keep on singing, “the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

The emergence of over the past few years of the concept of doomism is disturbing. This is the idea that the fight against global warming is a lost cause and that climate apocalypse is inevitable. Of course, doomism is not a new concept, throughout the centuries people have found many reasons to believe that the end may be nigh. The Bible is peppered with thoughts that one kind of evil or another will bring about the last chapter of history. But we should remember that it was the optimistic voices that kept the faith of the Jewish people alive when they might simply have been resigned to their fate.

The climate scientist Michael E Mann reminds us that the greatest threat to climate action is the “paralysis that comes from disengagement, disillusionment [and] despair.” That cannot be for us for we believe in eagles’ wings, in running without being weary and in walking without growing faint. (Isaiah 40: 31)