Christians protecting Muslims at prayer during an Egyptian protest (2011) 



We live, as Charles Dickens said in "A Tale of Two Cities", in the best of times and the worst of times. We have everything before us and nothing before us. Those lines irritated me so much when I was a teenager first reading his book. I didn't understand what he was trying to say at all, and I felt bitterly disappointed in this supposedly "great" novel. I hated his waffling and equivocating about the times of the French Revolution and, by his clear implication, about my own times, the Sixties. Either we were in good times for great and noble actions or we were in bad times and nothing of lasting worth was being accomplished. He ought to make up his bloody mind. 

I'm older now. I think I understand better what he was trying to say. In any "times", you start out assessing the problems and you work out balanced and thoughtful solutions in consultation with your colleagues. You then make plans to realize those solutions, and you begin to actively implement them in the real world. But ... ah, yes, but. When you're up to your ass in alligators, it can be difficult to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp. 

In other words, when we get into the middle of the confusing details of real, daily life, we have difficulty staying focused on our long term goal to solve, let's say, some major social problem that has been plaguing us and our community for, perhaps, decades. The forces resisting most real changes are deep and insidious. How they will manifest themselves in our own communities and workplaces can seem very confusing and overwhelming in the daily ups and downs of life. 

At times like those, we need to keep believing in the justice of our causes and long term goals. This is important to see because what I am saying is that belief in the long term rightness of our creating a society that contains wisdom, freedom,and justice for all requires a deep belief that will not be shaken by the ups and downs of temporary crises. 

The more determined atheists don't like the word that I am leading up to now, but it is the right word, and therefore it should be stated explicitly. What we need in order to make a better world in which we all really will survive and live together in peace is faith. Yes, faith. Even among the hardest of hard core atheists. 

Continuing to actively oppose the exploitation of women, the degradation of the natural world, and the spread of nuclear weapons, just to list three examples ...these causes are right. Even when you are facing an angry company of soldiers outside a girls' school in the developing world or a missile factory in the West or a coal burning power plant in India. If you stay and confront Power with the truth, force them to face it, you must have some kind of belief that is resting in deeper truths that are not at that moment visible. You believe in the justice of your actions even when you can't see how they can ever bring about any real change. Your actions at that moment would have to be viewed as irrational if you did not have some such belief guiding them. 

Faith in one of its simplest definitions is simply a belief in things not seen. And it is what, through humans, over time, makes abstract principles real. Pluralism really can survive and grow, even in a world stuffed with fundamentalists of every stripe who can't seem to get to hitting one another fast enough. We are emerging -- slowly, uncertainly, but with a gradually growing confidence -- into a new era in history, folks. Pray that it will come in time.  


 
            Muslims join hands to protect Christians in St. Anthony's church  (Pakistan (2013)