Among believers, there are some who think of God as the one who created the world, millions of years ago, but who is no longer involved in its affairs. They regard him as the One who metaphorically wound up the clock of history at the beginning of time and then left it to work on its own.

This is not the stance taken by Christians. Our belief is that God is not a remote disinterested figure of the distant past. The Bible tells us that he has spoken to us through various spokespersons and that he took on human flesh and shared an earthly life with a generation that lived 2,000 years ago.

In the coming Holy Week, Christians will reflect on the last days of that very special life: on the cruel death Jesus experienced, and on his victory over death in the Resurrection. Particularly encouraging are his final words, spoken on a Galilean hillside: “I will be with you always to the of the world”.

The realization, shared by believers of other faiths, that we are not alone, that help from on high is closer than we can imagine, supporting us through every hour of every day, that the last sunset of our lives in this world will be followed by the eternal dawn of a life hereafter provides great consolation as we go “through the valley darkness”.

Such thinking may seem a delusion to some but even if is a delusion, it’s a delusion of grandeur that adds purpose, energy, and nobility to life. Many today are quick to embrace atheism, secularism, and materialism as manifestations of a new enlightenment, while considering attendance at places of worship and the holding of religious values as old-fashioned and irrelevant.

Perhaps faith in God is neither the old nor the new but the true enlightenment. After all, faith vision and religious values are a response to the God whose fingerprints are strikingly evident in the world he created and in all its living creatures.

In the 1970s, Val Doonican sang: “Walk tall, walk straight and look the world right in the eye”. Surely, it befits those of us who believe in God “to walk tall, walk straight” in his ways, not to be shy, not to be fearful, but to look the worlds of atheism, secularism, and materialism “in the eye.”