The Future of Faith.

Faith was there at the beginning--why not at the end?

Faith has a future.

This is, for me, a creedal declaration: of course faith has a future. It has a future precisely because it has so long and so unshakable a past; believing in something, something out there, something beyond and other than the self, appears to be a human reflex. We are not entirely sure why the earliest cave-dwelling cultures chose to paint their cave walls, or make little clay dolls, but all anthropologists are persuaded that it was spiritual not aesthetic; it was not interior d[acute{e}]cor.

Earth colors and natural wild life are BIG this spring: Why not decorate your cave with hand-drawn stencils of local hunting scenes using natural pigments

was not the reflex of our earliest ancestors. It was something about connection, about the mysterious forces of life and death. It was prayer. Faith was there from the beginning of human culture. While every three-year-old still presses on with her monotonous, deafening, irritating Why? Why? Why? (rather than What? What? What?), we need not worry that this particular human behavior is in danger.

The real questions are harder. Does God have a future is an unframable question--and therefore an unanswerable one. God cannot be said to have a future because God cannot be said to have a past or a present. The necessary nature of God is to be, as the Christian Fathers put it, "without accidents or qualities." Grammatical tense, time itself, is simply not a useful referent when considering God. God exists in eternity. Eternity is not simply an everlasting Now: it is something other, mysteriously containing past, present, and future. The linear nature of language, indeed of human thought, makes it at one level unimaginable. God does not have a future only because it is the nature of God not to need one. Even the most contingent of theologies cannot ask or answer that question.

Does religion have a future? Does faith in something that we are willing to call God, and a structure that allows us, at whatever level of reality, to make a connection with that God have a future? I believe that it does. I also believe that a great many of us, especially those who believe that religion is important, are going energetically about the task of making that future as improbable, unlikely, and thin as we can. We work hard at reducing God to a school teacher, an instructor in Civics, Personal Development, and Morality. But frankly a God whose principal interest is in how and with whom I have sex, what films I watch, and whether I am "well adjusted" is not worth the effort. I already have parents, children, a tax inspector, and a whole society busy with those tasks. (Well adjusted? Dear God! Was it well adjusted of Abraham and Sarah to drag their household across a thousand miles of desert for the sake of a voice in a dream? Was it well adjusted for generations of Buddhist monks to go and live abov e the snow line in the everlasting silence of the mountains? Was it well adjusted of Blake to see "a tree bespangled with Angels" in the middle of a South London suburb? Well adjusted? Pah!)

The future of faith cannot take its stand here. Apart from anything else, it is redundant: we know perfectly well that honest atheists, agnostics, and adiaphorists live virtuous lives of civic service, psychological health, and ethical integrity. Faith is not about goodness, but about holiness. It is about creating and maintaining the tiny holes and narrow rips in the membrane between time and eternity, between immanence and transcendence, between the divine and mortal, between God and humanity.

The task of religious faith is not to tame the divine but to mediate it. To be, as it were, Jacob's ladder, set up between heaven and earth; to encourage the traffic of angels, coming and going. It is a task for the vigilant imagination -- making stories and symbols, performing songs and dances, enacting rituals and sacraments: not explaining mystery but exposing it. Here, here at the heart of all things there is a silence -- a silence where knowledge drops away, where virtue is dumb and humble, where anarchy has a harmonious laugh, and where extremely irreverent jokes are actually genuinely funny.

I myself am a Christian. I am a Christian for many reasons, and some of them I am aware are entirely pragmatic. But I am also a Christian because I believe that two thousand years of Judaism and another two thousand of Christianity have produced some terrific stories. Huge stories like, "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth, and God saw that they were good"; and "the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld its Glory." And smaller stories, like Sarah trying to stifle her laughter in the hangings of her tent because her God's plans seem somewhat ridiculous; or some drunken priest taking some so-called bread and placing it in the hands of some ten-year-old who did not choose to be there and saying, "This is the body of Christ," and the infinite, unknowable and eternal God consenting to that being the case, and making it so.

These four stories, and innumerable others, and the rituals and meanings they have developed over centuries of hard prayer and in sudden moments of inspiration, keep open the channels. Religion, at its best, is the servant of faith; the messenger between the aspiring faith of humanity and the infinite truth of God. The future of religious faith depends on our accepting that it is all mysterious and unknowable and untamable and bearing witness to that, while at the same time tending creatively and attentively to the infinite possibilities of connection.

SARA MAITLAND is a British feminist writer who describes herself as "working in the strange territory between theology and fiction." She is author of A Big Enough God (1995), which has been described as "the best book about God and Creation since the war," and Angel Maker (1996), a collection of short stories.