Every segment of life is both gift and challenge, both endowment and responsibility.

It is the warp and wool of the fabric we call time. The delicate interplay between the two has the power to rock us back and forth between total confidence and abject despair. We lurch through life between doubt and faith, between security and cloying uncertainty, between the enrichment that comes from differences and the divisions that come from fear.

It is learning to cling to a sense of thanksgiving for both that carries us through life to that moment when everything in us has come to fullness and our only next step is immersion in God.

And what is this faith?

Faith is belief that God is leading us to become in tune with the universe, however different we see ourselves to be.

Faith is trust in the unknown goodness of life with­out demand for certainty in the science of it.

Faith is belief that the God we call “our God” is either the God of all or cannot possibly be God at all.

Faith is confidence in darkness, for the willingness to trust in the deep-down humanity of others as well as in our own may be the deepest act of faith we can possibly devise.

Faith is the willingness to see God at work in others —in their needs and ideas, their hopes and plans—as well as in ourselves.

Faith is the certainty that God is working through others just as certainly as God is working through us lor the good of all humankind.