Where does your Faith come from?

Dover Beach

By:  Matthew Arnold

 Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Talk about a sharp contrast between the picture of the tranquil beach and the Dover Beach of Matthew Arnold!  Yet, he paints the picture of where we stand today...

wanting the harmony of the beach, feeling the "confused alarms and flight/where ignorant armies clash by night"...and think nothing of gassing their own people.  

Little solace comes from Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman where she points out in her book The March of Folly that we are a human race given to warring against our very selves---we have gassed our children through the ages.

It seems to me that all is quite hopeless if we take our faith from the world.  "There was an argument that went something like this.  If there is a watch, there must be a watchmaker.  If we have the world, there must be a Creator."   However, what are we to say if the watch is severely broken--that the watchmaker is broken?  

The other way to take our faith is from revelation--God's gift of sharing God through history to say that we don't argue from the world to God....but we have this faith because God has willed to share God with us.  CS Lewis in that anything but simple book, The Case for Christianity, points out that in a world of folly, given to war against itself, nevertheless...we have this belief in God because it is planted in us...God wills to give God to us.  

Another poet, Madeleine L'Engle wrote that: 

"That was no time for God to be born in a world in the grip of Rome, 

yet love still took the risk to be born."