Cedric Mayson
spirit level Faith comes in two versions. There is faith as a focus and faith as a force, faith that imparts knowledge and faith that imparts experience, faith that informs your thinking and faith that kicks you in the bum. Neither of them is limited to religion.
Faith as a focus deals with the imagery that runs through religion, culture, business and politics. It is the story of Jesus the man from Galilee and his teaching, and the religious traditions, creeds and rituals that developed in the ensuing centuries.
For the Parsi the faith is focused on Zarathustra (Zoroaster), who lived six centuries before Jesus but taught many of the notions that appeared later in both Hebrew and Christian thought: the idea of a loving Father-God of all humanity (Ahura Mazda instead of Jehovah), of a coming Kingdom of God and of good and evil. It is a pity there are so few Parsi in South Africa.
Faith in Jewish terms begins with Abraham, emerges through the long histories of the children of Israel, the founding of the Laws, the teaching of the prophets and the Psalms, and embraces the vast range of traditions that have emerged over the centuries in the extraordinary travels of the Jewish people.
Here in South Africa, where Jews enrich us with a variety of accents and carry an astonishing selection of surnames, their faith unites them.
In Islam, whether their ancestors in South Africa came direct from the north or on a long journey via the east, the focus of faith is on the Prophet Mohammed who emerged 600 years after Jesus, the Quran, the daily exercises of prayer, and the regular giving of alms. (If our Christians gave to others on the same basis as the faithful of Islam, it would make a profound difference to the poverty produced by our economic system).
The faith of Hindus is sourced in a history older than all the others, the splendour and riches of its temples conveying something of the immense wealth and variety of its teachings.
At heart this faith too rests on belief in one Creator God, and its focus too is far more in the home and the family and holy books than in the priestly rituals.
African traditional religion has carried its faith through stories and rituals, which were seldom written down until recent years, and that many missionaries from other faith histories thought they had banished for ever. They were wrong.
Although the rural background continues to be swallowed up in town and city culture, and despite the broadening of education, many are finding that ancestral faith contains truths and insights that are crucial to the recreation of human community in this post-modern age.
This is the faith we believe in, the focus that makes us tick. But the ticking itself is different, it is faith as an experience, a driving force that comes into your life and motivates you, turning the academic interest on which your faith is focused into a powerhouse of action.
A decade ago millions had faith in the struggle. The prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island and the youth that swept out of Soweto in 1976 shared many stories of the focus of their faith, but the inner experience of believing the struggle would succeed was a force that drove them on. That faith was not an intellectual assessment but a confidence deep in the being of their person.
Many feel the same way about women liberating themselves in religious and political and business life; or about establishing a new economic system that does not condemn millions to poverty; or about living a positive ecology that does not destroy the planet. Some catch faith as a power to bring different religions together to unite in establishing goodness, in caring for those infected or affected by Aids, in turning love into politics and caring into revolution, and spreading this experience of faith as a power to transform the nation. “It is happening! We shall overcome!”
It is as if there is a great force at the heart of the universal human community that rises up to give people confidence that justice and peace and goodness will triumph, and injects them with a driving force to become part of that process. This is faith as an experience, the transcendent force of a power greater than ourselves at work within ourselves. In the struggle to transform our country from racism, greed and violence into harmony, generosity and peace this is the type of faith we need.
In a small town in the Eastern Cape there is a man who shall be nameless. Like all of us he saw the rows of men and women sitting by the roadside outside the townships waiting for someone to offer them work. One day he stopped his car and sat down on the kerb too.
He talked with them, listened to their problems, discovered their lack of skills, discussed what could be done and gave them faith.
Those people now run several brick-making plants, build houses, put in electricity, bake bread, grow and sell vegetables, have their own home factories to make clothes. And the youth are involved too. He gave them the experience of faith and their faith has saved them.