Prema Jayakumar

We speak casually of being shaken to the core. And yet it can happen actually and then it is not a matter of casual mention. It is devastating in its results. Most of us have something we hold to be inviolate. It might be your faith in yourself, might be religious faith, faith in an ideology. It might be your faith in the integrity of an elder, it might even be your being sure of someone’s love. This one thing is beyond question, beyond doubt and is the basis of your confidence in your own self, the foundation that holds you up when you face vicissitudes. All strength and force of a man usually comes from his faith in something. This belief makes him strong. Philosophers can say that faith without doubt is death, but most people need some that is absolutely certain to hold on to.

A movie I saw recently made me think of this. A man who is absolutely certain about his memory, sure than he can recall not just events but even figures and other data, has this faith shaken. People around him, who had been taken for granted by him, hurt by him, decide to make him doubt himself in that core faith. Since all of them share a lot of information about him, it is not too difficult. But the result was not the rather malicious leg-pull that they had planned, but his descent into madness.

That might be an extreme case. But take anyone who has lost some faith that was important to them. A friend who married outside her religion finds it difficult to remain cheerful in spite of everything else around her being all right. Not that she has really lost her faith, or converted into another religion, but she has lost the feeling of community, the world of rituals that were familiar and comforting, the things that had been taken for granted while growing up. Youngsters who have been told they can get anything by prayer and that sincere prayers are answered might find it difficult to accept when their own prayers have not been answered. I remember Philip in Of Human Bondage being told by a well-meaning, but insensitive, person that he can cure his club foot by prayer. He prays and prays but the club foot remains. This alters everything, the way he looks at life.

One sees the same thing in people who have lost their intense faith in some ideology. You find them very cynical, critical of anyone’s faith in anything. As though, their ideology letting them down has meant that no ideology, why ideology alone, they’re sure nothing is worth believing in. The more intense their involvement earlier, the more bitter their disillusionment and cynicism.

A lot of people define themselves by the work they do, the position they occupy in their organisation. The loss of that definition either by retirement or redundancy has them floundering. Once they lost this it was as though they gave up life itself. So many people who did not have other serious interests have died soon after they stop working. This was more so in the last generation, not quite so much with the present lot. The younger people rarely give their allegiance to an organisation and a job is just a job that pays well, not your life. Their work is usually just what they do, not what they are. They might work as hard as they can to be a success in it, but they don’t have an emotional commitment to the work and the organisation that an earlier generation had. But even for the present generation, success is a criterion. Someone who has succeeded always, been the rank-holder, the first to get promoted, finds that they cannot stand being second best, the one passed over. Anyone who has tasted failure earlier does not find it so difficult.

Again, when someone you trusted to do the right thing always is detected in some wrong-doing and it is not just that someone you lose your trust in, it is everything you held to be certain. This could be a guru either spiritual or temporal, a family elder, a friend you looked up to. The argument is that if so-and-so could do this…. Or when someone whose love for you had thought was so firm that you could build your life on that certainty, turns out not to care that much, the ground beneath your feet really shakes.

So, yes, faith certainly, but a little reserve of something else as well?