Faith helps us deal with hurt.  Our faith in God, our faith in the people who love us, their faith in us.  I understand there are many who view the concept of faith as a weakness or delusional.  Sometimes I lack the intellect to fully refute their insights.  But contrary to what many claim, faith is not a comfortable place to live.  It requires a degree of trust in a reality that is beyond what we can know with our senses or our science.

Faith does not displace science.  We need both. I am fascinated and engaged by the discoveries of neuroscience.  The more we know the better we are able to help each other. For example, the knowledge that people become hard-wired into our neural pathways helps me make sense of people’s telling me they can sense or even hear someone who has died.  The dead do live on with us because they become a permanent part of our memories.  And if we are wise enough to record what we knew and know of them then they live into another generation.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that faith is the evidence of things not seen, the assurance of things hoped for.  Faith is about living with the hope of more, more to discover, more richness (not riches) in a world that we are wise to treat as a gift, one not to be exploited.

My “definitions” of God, are really understandings that help shape my thinking and then develop or change as someone presents me with a clearer description.  They have changed over time.  As I write this the words that encompass, without limiting my understanding of the Divine, are that God is the informing compassion and wisdom of the universe.  Take the word informing in more than one way.  God is who or what not only informs us but in-forms compassion and wisdom in us.

This is something of a riff on Paul Tillich’s description of God as the Ground of Being, but it also relates to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writing about Jesus, the Man for Others who reveals God to us.  Some of you will understand that phrase as a description of a personal God.  Some of you will understand it as a description of a supra-personal reality.  Either should help us understand our current reality.  

[Whilst] everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates.  That informing power or spirit is God....And is this power benevolent or malevolent?  I see it as purely benevolent.  For I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.  Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light.  He is Love.  He is the supreme Good.  -Mahatma Gandhi