Faith and Hope

What Matters Most….Commentary by Jim High

Recently I was in a meeting with about a dozen people who were discussing a wide range of ideas about several topics, religion being one of them.  I told the group that two words used a lot by religious people bothered me.  Those words are faith and hope.  And after some further discussion they kind of understood what I meant.  So this column is for the purpose of further clarifying why these two words bother me so much.

I’ll start with hope.  Maybe my dislike of this word goes back to a time in my business career when someone was always saying what we were going to do, and that “hopefully” it would turn out OK.  I thought then, and think now, that we need more than just hope to move things forward.

Going to the dictionary we find that hope can be used as both a noun and a verb.  As a noun it means the feeling that what is wanted can be had, or that events will turn out for the best.  That seems to make perfect sense since no one has ever hoped for something bad to happen.  As a verb, the dictionary says that hope is to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence, to believe, desire, or trust in a satisfactory outcome.

What’s missing from all this hoping?  Well actually doing something, of course.  Hoping is not constructive, and hoping causes nothing to happen.  Planning and working toward some specific goal causes things to happen in your life.  We all have problems, we all want positive results.  We want to solve our problems, but hoping is never going to help.  Only doing helps.

So don’t tell me you have hopes, or that you are hoping for the best.  Tell me what plans you have made, why you think those plans are correct, and why they will give you the satisfactory result that you want.  And most important, tell me what you are going to do to put your plans into action.  We can make our lives and our world better, but not by hoping, only by doing.

Faith is a noun, and the dictionary gives many examples of how this word is used.  Most involve religion in some way, but not always, as in belief in anything such as a code of ethics, standards of merit, obligations of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, obligation etc.  In these non-religious examples of faith we expect on faith that a person will do what they are suppose to do, or what they actually said they would do.  I don’t have a problem with faith in this context, except of course, when the other person does not live up to the faith that I have in them.  Which happens rather more often than any of us would like.

It’s the other definitions of faith that bother me.  Number two in the list of definitions is belief that is not based on proof.  Number three is belief in a particular type of god, or in doctrines and religious systems, or teachings of religions taken on faith alone.  In Christian Theology faith  is defined as, the trust in God and His promises as made through Jesus and the Scriptures by which humans are justified and saved.

Mark Twain wrote that, “Faith is believing what your know ain’t so.” It’s a cute quip, and he was the master of quips, but faith is so important to people I prefer to quote from a more thoughtful source on matters of faith.

Here is what the Buddha had to say on the subject of faith.  “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.  Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.  Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.  Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.  Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.  But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

What Matters Most……..is that we need to think about the words we use.  We need to decide if they really convey the meaning we intend for them.  Faith and hope are two words that give me problems, and I stated why that is so.  All any of us can do is study and learn, and using reason decide for ourselves what is important in life, what is “conducive to good and benefits one and all”, and then as the Buddha says, “accept it and live up to it.”  Living your faith turns faith into a verb and makes it active, and that’s what matters most.

© 2011 #11  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467