What does it mean to have faith?

Have faith is a common advice from a lot of people. When a Christian says it within the rubric of the Christian worldview it has a specific meaning. It does not imply believe that things will turn out alright, it does not mean have faith in your self. It means have faith in God's purpose for you, know that he actively intervenes in the affairs of mankind and subordinate yourself to God's purpose purpose. That presupposes a belief in the existence of God and the existence of an afterlife.

Taking a look at the presuppositions, are they blind beliefs or are they justified true beliefs? Take the first, existence of God. Many have argued that it is the latter using a variety of arguments pegged on a beginning for time, existence of morality, life and its properties, explainable attribute of nature and the world around us etc. Listen to any debate between an atheist and a theist, you can see that it is a reasonable belief to hold. With regard to existence of an afterlife, Christ and his resurrection are seen as a historical event and that is a powerful evidence for existence of an afterlife. Again, refer to historians debating the matter of resurrection, there are grounds to hold to the belief of historical event of resurrection.

I have dealt with the presuppositions only summarily because they are vast topics in itself and many have dealt with it extensively in the past and I see no reason to go there again. I do a broad reference to the justification for those beliefs only to make the claim that these presuppositions are more justified beliefs and therefore more in the domain of reason and less a matter of faith.

Given the above, what does it mean to have faith in the Christian sense of the term at a concrete level. Stemming from the presuppositions and at a more flesh and blood level, have faith refers to believing in God's assurance and His love. And that is a matter of faith. Existence of God is not a matter of faith, what God is is a matter of faith.

A way in which I can explain that faith is to narrate a story an uncle once told me about my father (his younger brother) and my grand father. My father was involved in campus politics when he was into his graduation at a college in Kerala. There were instances when police came searching for him and there were perhaps the threat of some kind of minor violence. My grand father gave a word to my father then. "Eda evidelum kozhappathil chennu chaadiyal, vilichekkanam, njaan vannu kondokkolam." (Hey, if you run into some trouble, call me, I will come and take you home.) Now, the son can find solace in the words of the father and live life with that assurance. However, there can always be doubts about whether the father can cross the distances, overcome the challenges, whether the father will practice tough love or soft love, whether the father might take the wrong strategy or the right strategy, will the father misread the situation, have I gone too far in my ways so on and so forth. But the word of the father gives the son a sense of assurance that seems to transcend these doubts in some manner enabling the son to live with that assurance. And that I believe is what is implied by having faith. There is a word that we have from our Living God, our Father and we have a sense of assurance in that word. In other words, we must place our faith in the word and more importantly in the God and Father who gave the word. It is that faith which helps us live life to the fullest.

Yes, there are instances when we waver in our faith. We do not experience that sense of assurance. It is not uncommon. What we must realise is that it is not lack of evidence that leads to that absence of sense of assurance. For those of you familiar with the story of exodus of Israelites from Egypt, they had all the evidence of God being with them and yet they strayed and there were moments when they did not have the same sense of assurance when faced with trouble (response of Caleb compared to others brings out this rather sharply).

So what do we do when we find that assurance to be missing. Well, what would we do if it is our biological father? We will speak to him or we will remind ourselves of instances where he has pulled us out of trouble. Same with God our Father, pray and refresh your memory of his saving grace in the Bible and in your own life. 

Cricket Oh Cricket..........

Cricket, a game that I have loved ever since I can remember. The earliest memories of my childhood are related to playing cricket. Playing the game with a plastic bat and then by age 4 quickly graduating to a wooden bat. In fact, there was an occasion when, due to a miscommunication, both my parents ended up buying me a cricket bat each on the same day. Of course that was a happy miscommunication.

There are too many memories associated to cricket. Stories of celebrating an off day at school with cricket, coming back from embarrassing bowling performances by focusing on fitness and skill development, my insecurity coming to the fore and running away from a University Tournament, observation of leadership by cricket team captains and much more. But nothing beats the sheer joy of playing the game.

But what I have noticed is that what started as a love without reason has now reached a stage where I try to explain or maybe justify my love with reasons. I am not sure if it is a good idea to do that. Let me explain a specific instance. I once came up with the following reason to love cricket. In cricket, the tradition was for the umpire to ask the fielder whether the ball had bounced in front or behind the boundary rope; which determines whether to add 4 runs or 6 runs to the total of the opponent. Or the umpire can ask the fielder whether his body touched the rope at the time of making the contact with the ball or not. Again, the implication is how many runs to be added to the opponent's total. In both cases, the umpire goes with the word of the fielder when the fielder has a clear incentive to lie. Such a practice can be expected to give fair results only in an environment where a culture of integrity is valued and practiced by everyone; at the very least, a very very large majority. I keep coming up with reasons like this to explain the love for the game, a love that I have had since I was 4 or 5 and using reasons that would not have been appreciated by me until I was 12 or 13 even if were an extremely precocious child (which I was not sadly).

Love leads to discovery. And as we discover more, our love grows stronger.

Justice and Compassion

I came across an opinion piece in the Indian Express by Pratab Bhanu Mehta, a reputed academic with a number of acclaimed publications to his credit. The piece can be found here.

I found a point made by the author where he says "The widespread cooperation with the gruelling demands of the lockdown (countering COVID-19 in India), on some interpretations, can also be seen as expressions of solidarity. But this should not blind us to the fact that solidarity, in the true meaning of the term, is failing us, just at the moment we need it most. It is failing us because at the core of the idea of solidarity is not pity, compassion, or even care. It is justice.

Compassion and pity has been given a bad name in modernity's emancipatory discourse because it apparently fails to address the issue of power relations. I think it is slanderous. I am not going in depth into the reasons of why I think so. Partly because it is something that I am basing more on intuition rather than a carefully thought out argument.

Before I go into why I think so, I must also say that my own personal evaluation has been from justice to compassion. When I was working with Social Initiatives Group, ICICI Bank which later transformed into ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, we had the opportunity to define a vision statement for the Foundation. I can claim credit for introducing the word Justice into the vision statement as I had brought in the word into the discussion by the group working on the vision statement. (The vision statement was later changed after a few years, but that is a different story.) Later, when I was heading Zyxware Technologies, where I am currently, again, an organisation with an ambitious social vision along with its business vision, I was in two  minds between what I felt where the competing pulls of the ideas of justice and compassion. This time, I included both the ideas into the statement. But the more I live, the more I feel that it is the latter that is at the heart of justice itself.

Now coming to my claim of giving compassion a bad name being slanderous. Justice usually requires a complex political, social and economic construct in ones mind and often two agents which can be individuals or formal and informal institutions who have a shared understanding of responsibilities. This understanding that is agreed upon can be called as a social contract. There are plenty of instances in human experience - of past and present - that suggest that human beings still have to act on behalf of others and for others in the absence of such a social contract. For instance, a war zone, a place under a civil war, dysfunctional state etc. Most of us ignore such experiences or treat that as temporary or as of the too distant past to be worthy of serious intellectual consideration in the context of ideas of justice (War Crimes Tribunals notwithstanding). But we are making a fundamental mistake there. We forget that the undergirding for social contract is compassion. It is compassion which gives us the idea of justice. Extreme situations reveal that to us. In normal times, we forget about compassion. Forgetting compassion is dangerous. Giving it a bad name is slanderous.