Dear Faith
Please don’t see this cri de cœur as blasphemous. It isn’t meant to be. You may also consider it self-indulgent. That is somewhat inevitable given the subject. It is a genuine letter. How does one say that today with so many fakes about? I have tried.
I miss you, Faith. I miss the authority of your judgments. I miss the sentiments of your rituals. I miss, most of all, the line-up with other people to receive communion. And this is strange because I hate queues. But this never is a queue. It is a community in line to show its faith with a symbolism of the human need to eat. So why not join it again, belief or not?
Because to me faith is more than ritual, comfort and judgment. It is a gift of the most precious kind, a generosity beyond the many years I have lived, a consignment rather than an assignment. You don’t have to be worthy to have faith but you do have to believe. And there’s the difficulty. However well guided by the Deity, if there is one, humans make the rules. Some of the rules of Catholic belief I find unreasonable. Here’s an example. On 01Nov1950 Pope Pius XII declared the assumption of the Virgin Mary body and soul into heaven as dogma. If you don’t believe that you are no longer a Catholic. It is still infallible under papal infallibility
It wasn’t so much my belief or non-belief that stumped me. Polls showed that some 99% of Catholics interviewed agreed with the doctrine. But faith is not an issue of what is popular. If there was one person among the billions of Catholics in the world who sincerely could not believe this dogma, then s/he was automatically excommunicated from the church. It seemed arbitrary and frankly unkind. Dogmatic faith not only seems a contradiction in terms. It runs counter to the very thing that makes us human – variety.
The joys my family have brought are that they get on well together but are all different. From Tim Adam, engineering grandson in Glasgow to theatrical producer grandson, Max, flying between Shaftesbury Avenue and Broadway; from mathematical genius grandson Roland and his equally brilliant sister Alice to patient granddaughter Kate tending to people’s personal and emotional upsets; to a grandson who I may not name because of the tight security aspects of his work; to yet another grandson, Tom, who makes recordings to enlighten us for generations, these and my other four grandchildren and their spouses and children show the variety of the present generation that my five children have brought up.
I’m so grateful they are all likeable but gloriously different.
With the privilege of a family like that I am happy to have my belief in them and in all the other people who are trying to make our planet a better place.
So thank you, Faith, for the gifts of lovely people.
And please allow me to go on missing you, just a little.
Good morning
John Bittleston
12 January 2026
