Faith · fiction
Having faith without religion
A story in dialogue, in 2040, between an engineer who doesn't believe and her father who burns incense at an old temple. About a faith that needs no creed.
A vision — a short story.
In Hong Kong, in the year 2040, the buildings talk to each other with lights. The engineer had helped program part of that conversation. She knew by heart the logic that made an eighty-story tower warn another that the wind was about to shift.
But she didn't know why her father, every Saturday, climbed the slope to the old temple to burn incense.
"Dad, you know no one is listening."
Her father, eighty-one, pushed the sticks into the sand of the bronze urn, with the calm of someone planting.
"I know you think so."
"I know so. I work with signals. If someone were listening, there'd be an answer."
"And there isn't?"
She didn't answer. The smoke rose in a straight line and then, a hand's width from the ceiling, dissolved into curves none of her algorithms could predict.
"Tell me something," said her father. "When you and your team spent three years on that bridge project everyone said would collapse, why did you keep going?"
"Because the calculations showed it wouldn't collapse."
"The calculations showed it on paper. But no one had ever built a bridge like that. You believed in something that didn't exist yet."
"That isn't faith, Dad. It's engineering."
Her father smiled and sat on the stone bench, its center worn by centuries of people sitting there.
"When I was your age, I didn't believe in anything either. I left your grandfather's house after a fight. I thought this temple was something for old people. Then came the crisis of ninety-seven, I lost the shop, your mother fell ill, and I had no calculation left that worked."
"And you came here."
"I came here because it was cool and free. I sat on this bench. And I realized I wasn't asking anyone for anything. I was just quiet. And, being quiet, I could hear something the noise didn't let through: that I still wanted to live."
The engineer sat beside him.
For an instant, she had a kind of vision. She saw all the people who had sat on that bench. Fishermen from before the city existed. Women waiting for husbands who were at sea. Shopkeepers who had gone under, students before an exam, old people after a funeral. She saw that they had all sat there with no guarantee of an answer. And she saw that they had all stood up. That was it: they had all stood up and gone to live one more day.
She thought of the radio telescopes that, on the other side of the world, listen to the sky on a frequency band every country agreed to leave in silence, the band of hydrogen. No one knows whether anyone will ever answer. And they keep listening. That was science. And, somehow, it was also a kind of faith.
"Dad."
"Hm."
"I don't believe what you believe."
"I know."
"But I think I believe in something."
Her father didn't ask in what. He held out a stick of incense to her. She took it, without lighting it, and held it in her hand for a long time.
On the way out, he said the sentence she would take home:
"Faith isn't being sure who's listening. It's going on speaking."
Bairo, who found faith in a Christian congregation, makes a point of saying that whoever trusts their God of creation is right, regardless of creed, and that the faith that saved him excludes no one. Read: The seventh attempt.
The way forward
Faith may bear the name of God or no name at all; what it has in common is the courage to go on without a guarantee. Respect the faith of those different from you, because it usually grows out of a pain you didn't see. And, if you don't believe, find your stone bench: a quiet place to hear what the noise hides.