Have you ever seen or heard someone pray?  Have you ever seen or heard someone singing songs to what she believed was God?  If you have, have you asked yourself why she is doing it?
     More often than not, this person is doing such things because she believes someone out there is hearing her songs and prayers.  As the psalmist pointed out many centuries ago, "I believe, therefore I spoke" (Psalm 116).  Faith is asking, faith is speaking, faith is acknowledging and trusting in the presence of the divine.  People who believe in a divine speak to it.  They believe someone is listening.  People who do not believe in a divine do not.  To what, from their standpoint, would they be speaking?
     Speaking affirms and expresses the fact and experience of faith.  If you believe, if you really believe, you will speak.  Why otherwise would you bother with faith?
     Faith is only faith if it uses the visible to acknowledge and invest in the invisible.  It is an act of defiance, and it is an act of rebellion.  Faith takes what is rational and normal (speaking) and transforms it into something equally normal, in a world pervaded with the spiritual, but which validates it.  Faith makes what is real into something that makes the real become even more so.