The strange thing about religion is this. Human beings are God’s uncompromising priority. But they are not so in organized religion. Presumably, God is. But, going by biblical spirituality, the hallmark of God-centeredness’ is human-centredness. The concern I am raising here is not a new one. Two thousand years ago Jesus said:“Man is not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath is made for man.” (Mk.2:28)

Consider an analogy to see this issue in perspective. There is world-wide consensus that education should be child-centric. The ponderous establishment of education must exist for every individual learner. This is pretty much the point Jesus raised through the parable of the lost sheep. The need to emphasize the child-centredness of learning arose because students were deemed the means of education rather than its end. Decades of education reforms notwithstanding, the establishment-centredness of education persists. This parallels the practice of religion.

Everyone agrees that faith is the soul of biblical spirituality. Certainly so, in the vision of Jesus Christ. Faith was what he nurtured and lauded in people; and faith was what he required of all. But this ‘faith’ is different from ‘the faith’ of churches. Individual faith is a subjective power, the power to make what is unreal to empirical reason real to the spiritual life of the believer. It is unreal and non-rational –non-rational, to the world- to expect that the lame walk, the blind see and the dead return to life because somebody wills it so. It strains rationality that ‘bread and wine’ –which are material objects- become the ‘body and blood’ of Jesus Christ. This trans-substantiation is possible only through faith. But faith is primarily an attribute that indwells individuals. There is only one instance in the Gospels in which the faith of others is shown to avail a person irrespective of his own faith; a paralytic (Mk.2). It was for want of faith that he became a paralytic in the first place. So, it makes sense that his personal faith could not have been the logic of his healing and restoration.

Consider a secular analogy. A young man givesa handkerchief – as in the case of Shakespeare’s Othello- to a girl as a token of his love for her. This kerchief has two aspects. The material aspect evident to all; which is that it is a kerchief like any other kerchief. It has no special and outlandish worth. But, for the girl in question it may be the greatest of all earthly treasures. (At least, till they marry.) What transforms –or, in the religious language, what transubstantiates- an ordinary kerchief is the subjective disposition of the person concerned, a state which has its roots in a relationship. The logic of faith is similar, if not identical.

Now consider the disputes concerning the Mass or the Eucharist. To the Catholics, the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The Protestants, in a certain segments, believe almost likewise. The difference is that while the Catholics believe that this ‘transubstantiation’ happens via the priest and the liturgical ritual and is, therefore, is a reality at the point of administering the consecrated elements; the Protestant counterparts maintain that the mystical process of transubstantiation takes place at the point when the communicant receives the consecrated elements. (Other Protestant denominations subscribe to the ‘veiled presence’ and ‘memorial’ view of the sacrament.) Such disputes that have fragmented Christendom, though Jesus envisaged the sacrament as a nourishment for Christian unity. In the run-up to its institution Jesus prayed, “That they may be one, Father, even as you and I are one”. In other words, the spiritual authenticity of the sacramentis attested only by unity and mutual charity among Christians.  Ironically, the very provision for unity has been turned into a source of doctrinal and liturgical division and alienation.

The problem with such disunity and alienation is that it brings about spiritual stagnation and thickens the walls of denominational estrangement. But we are mandated to ‘walk in the Lord’, or to go forward. The good thing is that there is a way forward.  That way is faith. There is no dispute among Christians that that the Mass or the Eucharist is a sacrament of faith. No faith, no sacrament. Faith, according to the writer of Hebrews is the ‘assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen’ (11:1). The obvious inference is that faith is the impetus to go forward. It is a stepping stone to the future in which a superior spiritual state is realized. ‘Hope’ pertains to the future; or hope is faith in future. It is in the goldmine of the future that ‘the things not seen’ lie hidden of which faith today is the ‘evidence’. If the writer of Hebrews is not horribly wrong, it is the faith of the individual who is the building block of the church. An institution, no matter how overtly religious, cannot live the mystery of faith as outlined in the definition in the letter to the Hebrews.

The foundational purpose of the church is to exemplify faith. It is to equip the saints to live a life of faith so that its beneficial power and liberating message are felt and understood by the circumambient world. An act of worship on a Sunday is much more than a habitual observance or a display of the splendour of ecclesial authority or resources, valuable as they may be. Especially in relation to the sacraments, the argument of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins holds good: they are meant to help us to be a people of faith, imbued with a sacramental vision of life. When this sacramental culture evaporates from the framework of the sacraments celebrated, we are left only with liturgical words and gestures that fall short of building up the people of God. One is reminded of the barrenness and bankruptcy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth who tries to pray in a guilt-laden state: “My words go up, my heart remains below.”