By now you want a mellow voice to listen to; a perspective that is akin to yours, but somehow, strangely, at the same time against it – unobtrusively though; and in a non-judgemental way – because at this point you are no longer sure of all that you have come over the course of your life to believe to be true.

But we are not that voice, and for that we are sorry. We can make no such promise other than we will remain here with you if you like, so we can find that voice together.

By now you are tired of praying and listening and not hearing anything, and being told that you do not have enough faith. Or that faith is a gift, or a decision, or both, or that you have no choice but to decide that you have to freely choose to accept what you have exactly little or no experience or understanding of.

And if you want, we can imagine you are out on a visit, and then a friend comes and knocks on your door. He is bound to get no answer from within, no matter how earnestly or persistently he knocks. He can break the door down, even. But he will not see you, because you are not around. There is a barrier between him and meeting you. So with this we may like to assume that there is now a barrier between you and the event of an experience of him.

These might be our barriers now: rationalisation, logic, excessive thought, fear, hopelessness, depression, suffering, economic hardships, emotional disturbances; perhaps in the form of such a person in your congregation who you care for, but have not an inkling of a familial kind of love towards, but are forced to hover around them, only able to discuss bland inconsequentials and trivialities because you have been made to believe that any such kinds of feelings can only ever end in some evil. You agree that there is a proper time for everything, and that things will grow with time, but with a good question at the back of your mind concerning how a love is supposed to grow when there is no contact or interaction or discussion outside the context of your belief practice, or worse still that the person sees you as a source of temptation.

By now you have defended what you believed in with great conviction. You have convinced others, even, and many look up to you; so you feel you must not disappoint them. If you are without any doubts in what you believe, then you are among the fortunate in the sense that you are single minded and sure, but you are at the same time unfortunate because you may tend to be closed-minded and unaccommodating to another view that comes not because of a tussle for ego, or to win an argument or prove you wrong, but simply to know; having been stifled by a belief which gives no room for questioning, nothing but blind acceptance. And then you are hindered in your capacity to show such a person love.

We cannot understand everything. But there are things we do not understand and yet we believe in, because constant experience has made us used to them, such as the miracle of two cells’ fusion leading to conception and birth; or the witchcraft behind the miscellaneous technologies that drive the workings of mobile phones, computers and television.

By now because we have not experienced so much of what we have been taught to believe in, we have come of age to question it; and sadly we mostly do not follow the same logic of “we do not understand, but yet we believe in it”.

So now we say you should just believe and put yourself out of the misery of knowing… Or not knowing and wanting to, either way. There are many questions who no one will deign to answer and there are many others for which there are no known answers at all.

So that love should be our practice, and love should be our faith; where we do good by other people not for some ulterior motive; of drawing them closer to believe what we believe, or because of some eternal reward.