The long journey to faith
THIS WEEK’S WINNER
MANILA, Philippines - Carmela Ann U. Santos (“Mel”) of Paranaque City is a journalism graduate of Centro Escolar University-Mendiola. She has worked for MIAA as a writer and dreams of writing her own book someday. She enjoys books by Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Max Lucado, C.S. Lewis, and “lately, I discovered Mitch Albom.” If not a writer, she would be a teacher.
It wasn’t my first time to read a book about faith.
Being born and raised as a Protestant, I was introduced to the word “faith” quite early on, but finding true meaning in the word did not happen as fast — until I underwent major spinal surgery in high school and began to establish a personal relationship with the Lord. When I reached college, The Purpose-Driven Life became my instrument of change, causing my life to take a full turn, from being me-centered to God-centered. Now, 25 years later, it was the same word I saw — not inside a church, but in a book store. I ran across a book titled Have a Little Faith. Again it wasn’t my first time to read a book about faith, but it was the first to read what Mitch Albom had to say about it. So, with faith that the book would open another window of light in my life, I began to escape from my world to his.
It’s a story of two individuals living in two different worlds, embracing two different faiths: Henry Covington and Albert Lewis. From his real-life encounters with each of them, Albom was taken on an unusual journey that made him stop and thinl for a while. There he found a beautiful lesson, one that only proves a divine spark lies in each of us, and that spark may one day save the world.
It all started when Mitch was asked by his rabbi, Reb Lewis, to write his eulogy. It was a question that later on led Mitch to do face-to-face meetings with the Reb and to ask more questions about his life and what he thought about it. These questions were supposed to help Mitch in his eulogy project, but the answers served an even greater purpose than that. Little did he know that he was actually starting a journey to a certain kind of belief.
Mitch: People are so flawed. They ignore ritual, they ignore faith — they even ignore you. Don’t you get tired of trying?
Reb: Mitch, that’s what faith is. If they (people) spit in your face, you say it must be raining. But you still come back tomorrow.
* * *
Mitch: When bad things happen to good people, does it ever weaken your belief in God?
Reb: I cannot waver. It is far more comforting to know that God listened and said no, than to think that nobody’s out there.
* * *
Mitch: Why does man kill man?
Reb: One thing God gave us is free will, freedom to choose. He gave us everything needed to build a beautiful world, if we choose wisely.
* * *
Mitch: The secret of happiness?
Reb: Be grateful. Be satisfied. That’s it.
On the other side of the world was Henry. Raised in a poor community as a boy, his family didn’t figure much in his life. When Henry was five years old, his mother was sent to jail after fighting with her husband, and just a few years later, his father died. At the age of 10, in a small Bible camp, Henry accepted Jesus as his personal savior. Like what happened to me, that first encounter with the word “faith” and Jesus wasn’t the kind of faith that Henry knew from inside out. It was something he heard and accepted in his heart without understanding what it was, and thus without knowing what comes next. Two years later, his mother blurted out a prediction that Henry was going to be a preacher one day. At that time, Henry knew no other direction than his present life — cigarettes, alcohol, women and drugs. “A preacher? Do you know how much of this stuff I’m smoking?” he said.
It isn’t about how you started, the book tells us, but how you end up in the race. You can start down the right path — as someone who religiously follows rituals and puts beliefs into action — or down the wrong path — as someone who follows his own rules and breaks the rest. Either way, none of the paths you took in the beginning will ultimately define the kind of race you run in full. Winners are crowned at the finish line, not at the start. Just the same with life and our journey of faith — it will only make sense when we’ve reached the end.
Mitch thought it would be a two- or three-week journey of taking down notes, recording conversations and taking photos. But the eulogy assigment took eight years, and he never started with it while Reb Lewis was still alive. It was only after a phone call eight years later that he faced the inevitable task of sharing with a congregation the memories he had of the rabbi, a man who left such an impact on his life and, eventually, in the lives of his readers through this book. During those eight years, Henry also reached an ending and waved goodbye. Not to the world that Reb Lewis left behind, but to his own world of chaos, emotional struggles, and addictions. Most of Henry’s teenage and adult life was spent in prison. When he married, he literally found a partner in crime. He and his wife both became addicts, specializing in the drug-dealing business. But as the case with any lost soul, they reached a point where they took a long look and asked, “Where is God?” The next day, Henry and his wife decided to go and find Him. The old Henry died, and as a new one emerged, his mother’s prediction came to life: Henry became a preacher. As Mitch was writing a eulogy for Reb Albert Lewis, Pastor Henry Covington is leading the congregation of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Church, a church that started as a deteriorating old room with a huge hole in the ceiling; but inside that pitiful structure, lives are being made whole again.
“In some ways we have a hole in our roof, a gap through which tears fall and bad events blow like harsh wind. We feel vulnerable, we worry about what storm will strike next. But with a little faith in God, things can be fixed and they can truly change, because at that moment, you could not believe otherwise.”
Faith. We sometimes tend to regard it as just a word. But now we learn that life without it is not life at all.
