Are We Keeping the Faith?

I have come to sense in recent months that America's felt sense of division and hurt and alienation from each other is not so much a political, social, or cultural issue, but is a faith matter.

We are taught basic truths, even important Biblical commands and insights, but we are pressed by America's enchantment with multi-culturalism as a call to be fair to all, and the value of equality, that has led us away from deeper matters of living a moral life, of aspiring to God's call to love, and so to care about people without diminishing the purity of our own deepest commitments.

We've felt we have to give up the distinctives of our faith - like Jesus' call to love and follow Him alone, above all others, to be absolute in our highest loyalty.  In seeking a gentler, kinder expression of our ultimates, we have lost sight of what we had in our purer sense of "my utmost for His highest." We have given up our quest for the ultimate, in our putting in their place secondary values.

We have lost our distinctives, and so have lost the power and pull, and attractiveness of the purer faith we embraced as children.

So, in real ways have not "kept the faith," but have let it go, little by little, amounting to a kind of squandering of the precious thing we had - in favor of a blandness that has become a good feeling, centering on human relationships, forsaking the radical commitment demanded by the call of Jesus, and the utter commitment to another in marriage, or the loyalty to children.

We need to look again at what it means to "keep the faith" - which means living the faith radically - and seeing all other loyalties through the prism of our highest call.