Faith

For the week of 12/20, The Monitor’s – Christian Science Monitor, cover story was children and spirituality. Asking if according to the most recent data, only 20%-40% of Americans attend worship services, how do the majority of people help their children when children ask the big questions about faith, the meaning of life, evil and our place in the cosmos?

“If faith had a material origin and relied on a material God, it would be difficult to sustain faith in an entity that is so limited” as to be “inherently finite. How would a finite God remain relevant through changing times? A void between Creator and creation might open. However, what if faith…didn’t start with a” finite, historical “person? What if it starts with Spirit, and if creation is actually spiritual and infinite?

“’A saving faith comes not of a person, but of Truth’s presence and power,’” Mary Baker Eddy wrote. “If faith ‘comes not of a person,’ it also comes not of a religious institution of persons. It doesn’t even come from all religious institutions collectively. Faith comes from the timeless presence of the power of indestructible Truth. That’s why faith is a present possibility here in the high tech world, just as it was in biblical days.”
Such ‘faith is within reach to help both the religious and the nonreligious.” Such “faith is at hand to help one discover meaningful, even healing answers to life’s deepest questions.” We are of God right now, not when we die; the kingdom of heaven is within us, not in the sky. Biological research shows that humans are designed to embody faith in a power for good. For people with no religious training, this inclination toward faith may be latent and untapped, but it’s still there.

“So, it makes sense for those moved to pray to do so.” The prayer can be on behalf of one’s self, humanity as a whole, institutions, ideals or whatever; simple gratitude for the sky or birds or trees or someone’s smile. These ‘prayers’ arise like blossoms from the incipient faith already there, within. The more we allow such spontaneous gratitude and recognition of our connectedness with all that is, the more it will develop “into a transforming power, a healing force. It does this one heart at a time.”

Thus, even if society has no formal mechanism for supporting and developing faith, faith manifests and is nurtured.