Have A Little Faith

For a man at the pinnacle of power and one of the most important world leaders of the last 15 years, he was disarming. Tony Blair's demeanour was one of humility, warmth and an endearingly mild self-deprecation. Forced to file in to the luncheon at the Royal York Hotel with other dignitaries, it was clear he had come to terms with being famous but was still uncomfortable with it.Blair was in Canada to speak about faith, the religious kind - hardly the road people expected him to travel down when he left office. But he sees faith and its possibilities strategically and he's here to bring the powers of that faith together to with dire needs of Africa. Seated in the audience, I could sense a kind of collective discomfort at the subject. No problem with Africa, or humanitarian intervention, but faith? In Canada we are careful around this, opting to keep whatever faith we have well hidden under a bushel lest it offend others in this tolerant land.It was agreed we would meet for a few minutes prior to his speech and his interests were clear. He called on my own commitment to humanitarianism and wondered why more wasn't being done for Africa when Obama and EU leaders were calling for more support for that troubled continent. But more than anything, I sensed from this unusual man a sense of ... spirituality. It was unmistakable and yet he wouldn't talk about it. He preferred instead to talk about what all of our private faith could do if it was steered in one direction.Speaking at the luncheon, he ruminated: "Malaria kills a child in Africa every thirty seconds. Yet it is entirely preventable. Places of worship are present in every village in every part of Africa, forming effective networks in practical ways to reach people in need everywhere. Imagine what could be done if we galvanized faith communities in the developed world to support those in Africa, and demonstrated that if faiths work together, they can do even more than what has been achieved apart."

Out there in those remote parts of Africa a health clinic or hospital is a rarity. People have to travel miles, sometimes 100 miles or more to get there, but for obvious reasons they don’t get there and they die. But every one of those communities, no matter how remote, has a place of worship in it. And they could be the means of distributing the bed nets and medicine. The infrastructure of faith could be the answer to this problem.”

There's a clear logic to it, but one we don't quite embrace in this country because the platform for such an undertaking involves religious faith. Are we up to it?  No doubt, Blair could have accepted something far different but he nevertheless chose the powers of faith to be his main offering to the world. We're not talking about belief systems here, but the kind of belief that leads to the uniting powers of action. It's not just about humanitarianism or even internationalism, but the use of our own private faiths to solve those massive developments problems in Africa that other mechanisms have failed to accomplish. Jesus would do this, as would Mohammed.  Desmond Tutu, Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. already demonstrated how to do it. Now if only our own parliament could summon up those deep wells of faith, private though they are, and bring them together for the sake of saving lives, we might find that we are actually saving ourselves. That would be a parliament to be proud of.