The Guild

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Autumn 2007

Wednesday 10th October
This week I’ve been answering questions for one of those personal profile features in our local newspaper - it’s amazing what passes for celebrity in East Lothian.  They say the best way to approach this kind of thing is in a light-hearted, off-the-cuff fashion and that’s how I’ve tried to respond.  So if you want to know more about the woman behind the voice, order your copy now.

It’s been a fun thing to do, but in amongst the bits about your most embarrassing moment, your favourite holiday destination , and who you would want to take the title role in the film of your life story, comes the crunch question : Do you believe in God?
I answered in the affirmative. A simple “yes” seemed to be the right response – this wasn’t the time and place to engage in a debate about proofs for the existence of God.  But I hope no-one gets the idea that the simplicity of my answer means that it’s an easy question, for me - or for anyone.  

Militant atheists have been getting a lot of coverage lately and are on the march over creationism, extremism, faith schools, and much more that is fair game and rightly up for debate. What is less fair is the caricaturing of faith as a prop for the weak and feeble minded. Events in Burma and the courage of the Buddhist monks we’ve seen marching for justice at great personal cost should be enough to scotch that myth. 

But we don’t need to look that far afield. On Monday I was at a quiet service of holy communion in my local church. We came from our ordinary lives looking to find faith renewed, because sometimes faith gets pretty well used up. The people around me weren’t blotting out reality with trite words and sweet music – you can’t do that when you’re a mother whose child has died before her, or you’ve been betrayed by someone you love, or you’re living with mental illness. People didn’t come expecting faith to lessen their pain and anger and loss – they were there because that’s where these things can be honestly faced. And that’s the constant struggle of faith.  
	
Wednesday 3rd October
When David Cameron sits down this afternoon and everyone else rises ‘spontaneously’ to their feet, we’ll have come to the end of another party conference season, and I suspect many will breathe a sigh of relief.  So carefully managed are these events nowadays that only the physical ejection of a noisy heckler, or the complete loss of a sound system, can excite the rest of us.

As a conference organiser myself I felt real empathy with those who struggled to cope with the techno gremlins at Blackpool.  My own challenge at the guild’s annual conference this year was to re-jig the programme when a keynote speaker had to withdraw at short notice.  I was reliving the whole thing yesterday as I sat in an editing suite for my annual shot at being a film director.  The footage of the whole event has to be reduced to a 45 minute DVD, available for those Guild members who couldn’t make it on the day. 

As I revisited the excellent reports and speeches I knew that, whatever else ended up on the cutting room floor, one quote I didn’t want to lose was from the address by the Church of Scotland’s Moderator. She spoke about the importance of living with questions, particularly for people of faith. Not just academic questions set by clever theologians for cosy discussion groups of like minded people, but questions asked by those coming from a very different perspective, whose own faith opposes your own - and by those militantly opposed to any faith at all.  Living with questions, and dealing with doubt, are part of what validates faith and makes it live.

But the quote from the Moderator that sticks in my mind as the caravan moves on from  Brighton, Bournemouth and Blackpool is this – “we won’t find security for our own convictions by rubbishing someone else’s”.  If politicians could resist the temptation to rubbish each other, and try listening to the questions, some of our faith in them might be restored.