ABSTRACT
What sort of faith do I hope to develop? Will it be a Christian faith? Probably not. Certainly not in the sense of a conventional Christian faith. I admire Christ’s call for love and compassion and hope, so I will accept that as a contribution to my understanding of, and faith in, God. I will also borrow from American Indians. I respect their sense of the sacredness of life, the presence of life in all things. In the novel, Little Big Man, Thomas Berger accurately portrays this belief in a comment made by Old Lodge Skins, a leader of the Cheyenne (who call themselves “Human Beings”), “The Human Beings believe that everything is alive: not only men and animals but also water and earth and stones … But white men believe that everything is dead: stones, earth, animals, and people, even their own people. And if, in spite of that, things persist in trying to live, white men will rub them out” [22, pp. 227–228].
