Those Without Faith, 8 February 2018

In medieval England, it was the word belief,
Derived from the Germanic source of beloved,
That meant trust in God, while the word faith
Stopped at loyalty and duty to a person, thus
To prove one’s loyalty was to keep the faith.
But the senses shifted and evolved, as senses do,
And belief lost any association with love, caring,
Holding dear, and became only the holding
Of something to be real or true, while faith,
Rooted in a secular term for confidence,
Took on, perhaps because of its Latin source,
Increasingly the religious senses of trust
In God, in the Church, in Christianity as such.
Something was lost in the switch, although
Those older meanings themselves evolved
From earlier ones and those from earlier still, so
There’s no original, sacred meaning to any
Word anyway, certainly not to the word itself.
Nonetheless, faith as it travels conversation
Today may be one of the most two-faced words
Out there, a double-edged word to hold up
For awed celebration and to swing around
For fear and slaughter. Those without faith
Appreciate how dangerous this word can be.
Those with faith, like anyone owning a weapon,
Tend to think of their own as necessary,
Handsome, protective, and only of others
Owned by others as instruments of death.
Perhaps that’s enough sermonizing. I trust
The senses will shift still further, and this faith
Will go out of fashion. Unfortunately, words
Will not go out of fashion, not while we live
And they contest for territory with the rest
Of culture’s armies in the wastelands of our brains.