Life & Wisdom Quote by Sydney Carter

Carter smuggles a radical redefinition of faith into a single, quietly lyrical sentence. Faith isn’t framed as assent to doctrine or a bargain struck with the unknown; it’s a response, an answering-back. That word shifts the power dynamic. Something speaks first. The faithful aren’t credentialed believers so much as attentive listeners.

The phrase “calling us” carries an almost bodily intimacy: faith begins not in argument but in summons, like a melody you can’t unhear. As a poet (and a hymn-writer with a knack for making theology sing), Carter is less interested in winning debates than in naming a human experience many people recognize but struggle to articulate: the tug toward meaning that feels older than your current crisis, older than you.

“Timeless part of our reality” is doing careful work. It’s not “another world,” which would make faith escapist; it’s inside reality, but not trapped by the clock. Carter nods to mysticism and the Quaker-inflected idea of an inner light without sounding sectarian. The subtext is an answer to modern suspicion: if faith can’t be verified like a fact, maybe it can be practiced like attention. It’s existential, not evidentiary.

Context matters. Carter lived through a century that sandblasted certainty: world wars, ideological churn, consumer modernity. His line offers a way to keep faith without pretending history isn’t brutal or time isn’t relentless. Faith, here, is less a fortress than a posture - the decision to orient yourself toward the enduring signal beneath the noise.