I just had to post this quote from Jaroslav Pelikan’s article “The Will to Beleive and the Need for Creed.” It can (and should) be read in its entirety here.
Shema
But when personal religious faith has exhausted its allotted supply of “the courage to be,” when the only Psalm it can remember is not the one that begins “The Lord is my shepherd” (Ps 23.1) but the one immediately preceding it, which begins “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Ps 22.1), then, precisely then, we are not thrown on our own individual and feeble resources of believing or speculating or explaining (or even “experiencing”), such as that may be. Rather, though perhaps in a sense that he may not have intended, it is then that the admission of William James comes through and rings true: “Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.” For then it is time to confess: However much or however little I may be able to believe on my own, existentially, as of this precise moment, I affirm myself to stand, trembling, in the continuity and heritage of that community which has been confessing without interruption for entire millennia, “Shema Yisroel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod; Credo in unum Deum.”
