Explaining Faith, Hope and Love – (PowerHouseCreatives Contest)

Explaining Faith, Hope and Love

Let’s start with faith, Jethro Tull and Wind Up – a song that was very instrumental (no pun intended) in (re)forming(?) my relationship with God, and therefore my faith, when defining what I believe. I’m embedding a version that includes the lyrics, which are very important. Please have a listen and follow along, reading the lyrics.

Now that you’ve listened, I’ll tell you about how this changed me, my faith and the way I thought of God and religion.

I first heard this song while I was in a far off land when I was 19 years old. At first I thought it was sacrilege as it seemed to me, (a simple, God-fearing farm boy), to be mocking or making fun of God. You see, I grew up in a family that wasn’t religious and didn’t go to church. Then, when I was around 8 years old, a cousin started taking me and my older sister with her to this Baptist church, to go to “Sunday school.”

After a while, my parents started to go to that church because we were going. My dad had recently stopped drinking. He was always a mean drunk; the worse kind of drunk there is, IMO. I took a mean kick in the ribs from him when I was about 5, along with some other slightly less bruising encounters over the years, so all of us were glad he finally stopped drinking. And he really did stop. He never drank again after he stopped. But he was still a pretty mean guy anyway.

As you can imagine, his going to church was given some credit for helping him to stop drinking and then, to stay off the alcohol. Meanwhile, my two years older sister and I got a flash course in what Christianity was all about. We had never gone to church before we went with my cousin, and now the whole family was involved. Sunday was God’s day of rest, and no one should do any work or anything.

I plodded along with this belief, and got baptized when I was 12 (I knew what I was doing and what it represented). I’d become familiar with the “proper worship” of God because I went to that church every Sunday, so when I heard this song, Wind Up later in life in that far off land and heard what it was saying, I thought Jethro Tull must be the devil incarnate. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I really liked the song’s feel, its melody, and the awesome guitar licks, but being this kid, (me), who was very much like the kid in the song, I finally picked up on the message the writer was putting out there. God really isn’t the kind of God that you have to wind up on Sunday. If there’s a creator God, he/she is certainly beyond being fooled by this weekly orchestrated display of “affection” and “respect” charade.

That woke me up to what I’d been thinking it was all about due to the church’s message, and then to discovering it’s not God, but the religion that’s telling me that we think about God on Sundays at church, and the other six and a half days we’re free to involve ourselves in all kinds of debauchery, as long as we faithfully observe the Sunday worship thing and to make an “offering.” Sounds like a ridiculous way to symbolize and view a creator God, no?

This unmasking of how we mistreat “God” through our religions is very revealing. However, it doesn’t reveal that “God” is nothing more than another human-inspired fable. It simply makes God conform to what we/they want God to conform to, as long as we can be controlled with the way we/they control the God narrative and what’s expected of us. It actually bears little resemblance to faith, however. It’s just habit, after all.

If you want to see our mistreatment of God explained even further, listen to and read the lyrics for My God from the same (Aqualung) album below. The entire album is one of the best ever made IMHO, so if you’ve got some time… why not listen to the whole thing?

Hope

Obviously, hope is very closely related to faith, because if we have no faith in anything or anybody, we’d have a hard time maneuvering around our world, not sure of anything and totally uncomfortable with literally everything. If we were too afraid (of life, basically) to ever leave the house, there are lots of “life” things we wouldn’t be able to accomplish.

Removing all hope from a people will quickly get them in line, for when it gets to that point – when no hope remains at all – then the people will fall into full submission to those in control. This marks the point when all hope is gone; never to return, and faith is generally no longer a factor either.

In order for one to be able to hope, there has to be a reasonably clear way forward without ridiculous restrictions impeding movement. For example, before the Berlin Wall came down, consider the Germans in East Berlin who had no hope, yet many took the risk to try to escape and were shot dead; but not because they had hope they’d make it. They dared trying to escape so that they could find hope to sustain them further, as life for them at the time was pure Hell.

Love

If we have no faith and we have no hope, how could we possibly have love? It’s easy to forget really hard times when the hard times are far enough in the past they no longer directly affect us. We’re not even interested in why generally, those incredibly hard times came about when they did. We just know (or at least think) they’re not happening now.

I believe that love can happen under any circumstance, even when faith and hope are no more, and when even freedom is gone. I don’t believe there is any force or power that can stop two people from falling in love, regardless of the current situation in which they find themselves.

In fact, I had planned to write a love story, but I couldn’t ignore Faith and Hope, as they were the “elephants” in the room, out of the three which, by the way, seem to go together as a rule for creating signs and banners that link the three as a performing trio. (As illustrated by my post picture.)

But it’s true; people have fallen in love in some of the worst situations imaginable, facing extreme danger and even sometimes when they are in the middle of a huge fight with each other!

So there’s something about love that indicates it has a power that can bring us together, gives us faith there is happiness to be found in each others’ company, and provides us strength and maybe a spark of hope that our love relationship can sustain us.

If it were to happen that humans became extinct but all other current life forms continued without us, the world would operate strictly on love… the love of mothers for their babies. Life and nature!

_{Explaining Faith, Hope and Love © free-reign 2019}

Sources for images used in this post:

_{Faith Hope Love: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Love Quote: Image by Dev Ashish from Pixabay
Black Card: Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash}