Is faith simply an ethnic expression?  We have some good friends who are Muslims.  They came to the States from Pakistan in 1975 and never left.  They love America and would never return to Pakistan, except to visit.  And they love and revere Allah.  They pray to him at least five times a day.  Growing up as Muslims, they have never known anything else.  For them, being Muslim is being who they are.  If they had been born in the U.S., would they be Muslims?  While it is impossible to say with certainty, my point is that for them faith has been filtered through the lens of their cultural heritage, just as mine has been filtered through the lens of my American experience.  We express our faith amid our cultural baggage, for sure, and walk in it in the compass of our life experience.  We cannot do otherwise.

     So whose is the greater confrontation with the limits of the present?  We both walk in an aura of a coming thing, we both tread about in this life in light of the life we believe it will one day be, however we conceive and define it, we both understand existence through the skein of another one from which it came.  We cannot see life as existing independently, as life being accidental, as life being no more than the coalescing of subjective chemical experiences, as life being what has been made from what has been there.  We both hold to the fact of another presence.  Faith knows no boundaries.
     Ethnicity may drive the experience of faith, but it doesn't define the fact of it.  People have faith in God because they are human beings.  People have faith in God because they realize that all the scientific knowledge on the planet, valuable though it be, will not answer a most basic question:  why are we here?
     People have faith in God because they understand that humility is essential to humanness.