17 August 2000

To which Rex replies...

Dear Peter,

Come now.  You chide me unjustly.  I focused on priests because they were
the subject of what you called your "key point", and I didn't want to duck
it.

Besides, priests are something on which we disagree.  On Tony's infinitely
greater question, "Do you believe in God?", we are at one, as we also are in
believing that it is possible personally to encounter the Divine.

Where, perhaps, there is more to be said is on this question of "having
faith".  I think you're misrepresenting the whole idea.  You seem to define
it in terms of doctrines and middle-men: as a denial of the individual
person's direct access to God.  Now that might be acceptable as a jaundiced
definition of *belonging to* a faith, but *having* faith is a somewhat
different and more basic matter.

The New Testament definition - if you will allow me to get Mediterranean on
yer ass - is short and non-doctrinal: "Faith is the assurance of things
hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11.1).  That, I
presume, is the sense in which Tony feels he lacks it.

So how does faith - in this sense of the word - originate?  My hesitant,
amateur answer would be: it's not our doing.  God ambushes us.   So having
faith is not a reason for self-congratulation.  But it is necessarily
personal.  And it can be decidedly inconvenient - like colliding in the dark
with a piece of furniture you didn't know was there.

Now I hope you'll forgive my presumption but, to my mind, your certainty
that you have encountered God is, itself, faith. Yes, I accept it is based
on experience.  Faith normally is.  What you have is nonetheless a
conviction of things not seen.  I don't know whether you were ambushed in
the course of practicing yoga, or took up yoga because you'd already been
ambushed; only you can say.  But, in my judgment, the previous page of this
website is a powerful declaration of faith.