THE FAITH WE NEED
The
Human Dimension
Faith is believing.
We often believe in something or, more painfully, in somebody who might turn
out to be quite different from what we believed him to be. Faith is often
credulous: we are taken in by our wishes, by our fantasies, above all, by our
yearnings, by our longing for something or someone who will satisfy us to the
very depths. The law courts and especially the divorce courts tell the tale too
often. We are often let down, and the more often it happens, the faster our
faith disappears. The person who has let us down has lost his credibility with
us, as we say. Faith means acceptance: acceptance of someone’s words, for
instance, and behind the words, the person we accept. Faith also means that
other people can accept our words and us. It leaves us vulnerable. It leaves us
open to the possibility of betrayal.
Yet, without faith,
it is impossible to live. Every time, for example, we accept a cheque we
include the possibility that it will turn out to be a dud that will bounce. And
yet our whole financial system depends on faith or trust. When we marry we do
so in the firm belief that our spouse is faithful. We don’t expect scientific
proof for such ordinary and highly-esteemed beliefs in life. A chemist does not
demand that his dinner be laboratory-tested for poison before he eats it. The
detective does not consider his wife’s fidelity an open question until she has
been placed under round-the-clock surveillance. The traveller does not wonder
where his plane is going until he has mastered the techniques of navigation and
scrutinised the data of the pilot. In these and a thousand more important
matters daily life proceeds by a faith the rejection of which is considered
nothing short of insanity.
At the deepest level
we put our trust in life itself. We believe that life is fundamentally good.
Our faith discovers goodness at the heart of things. The result, though, in
many cases, is cynicism, the attitude that is summed up in the adage, “Blessed
is he who expects nothing for he shall not be disappointed.” For despite our
disappointments we go on believing. Why? Because, basically, in order to
survive at all we must have an almost animal love of life. It is a basic
commitment to life, to survival, to the sheer insistence on going on. It is a
belief that the basic hunger, the huge yearning inside all of us be satisfied.
Faith
in Jesus Christ
The Christian can build on this because the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ supports his basic faith in life. Christ’s
Resurrection is our own recurring resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus can
tell us something when life gets us down. Jesus was killed by cruel men but he
was raised by a loving God. The Resurrection tells us that when the worst
happens the best happens as well. It tells us that our basic belief in life is
quite right. Our deepest instincts are pushing us in the right direction,
pushing us into the ever-open future: not a pie in the sky, but eternal life now.
That is what all the simplicity and subtlety of the Christian creed is about.
We don’t just recite it; we surrender ourselves to it.
Thus, for the
Christian, faith is centred on Jesus Christ. Faith involves a special kind of
perception which discovers a special kind of meaning in certain experiences.
The meaning of these experiences entails awareness and some understanding of
God. The experiences may be of different types: intellectual, emotional, vivid,
cumulative, social, solitary, delightful, terrifying, contrived and
spontaneous. However, religious experience is not itself faith. But faith is a response
to religious experience, that accepts as valid the awareness and understanding
of God that the experience engenders. It is God who provides what is
religiously experienced and who enables human beings to experience it
religiously. He makes it possible to find meaning in religious experience and
to assent to that meaning as true. But the assent itself is an act of human freedom, though enabled by God.
The essential act of
specifically Christian faith is an assent to the discovery of divine meaning in
Jesus Christ, i.e. Jesus Christ as the personalised venue of divine salvific
purpose, present and acting in us. For the average Christian believer, the experience
of Jesus Christ, at least initially, appears to be a second hand perception:
the perception of Jesus about whom one is told by others. Christian revelation,
after all, is transmitted by tradition. The written Bible is the outstanding
and normative example of tradition, though not exclusively. By virtue of his
experience of Jesus Christ, the Christian by faith assents to the Gospel. That
is, the good news that in Jesus Christ God is revealed as invincibly loving and
as rescuing human beings from every kind of evil that they do or suffer in
order to lead them into perfect union with a goodness that is absolute and
eternal. To be drawn towards Christianity is to suspect that this is true. To
begin to be a Christian is to believe that this is the most important of all
truths. And to live as a Christian is to make the supreme value of this truth
the ultimate standard of human freedom.
Man
under the obedience of faith
In his very being man
is confronted with the will of the Creator. There is an inescapable decision to
be for or against God. For his own salvation and the good of his fellowmen man
is bound to the obedience of faith; to care for and nourish his faith is a
lifelong task. The Christian life is a symbiosis with the Lord (cf. Rom 6, 8;
Col 2, 13), a progressive death to sin and a renewal of life (Col 2, 12; 2 Cor
4, 10-11). What a Christian has acquired once and for all he must develop and
perfect (cf. Rom 6, 5-14). The “new man” (Eph 2, 15; 4, 24; 2 Cor 5, 17; Col 6,
15) is characterised by the loss of autonomy. He is no more the source of his
own life, the author of his own actions. Gal 2, 20, “and it is no longer I who
live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now lives in the flesh, I live
by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Hence, the
Christian’s moral life is an
extension, prolongation and unfolding of the life of Christ. Christians are
authentic children of God even here on earth, possessing by grace the same
divine nature as their Father in heaven (cf. Eph 1, 5; Gal 4, 5). The Christian
cannot and need not reproduce Christ’s deeds materially, but he must adopt
Christ’s manner of thinking and judging (1 Cor 2, 16, “but we
have the mind of Christ”), be inspired with his sentiments, copy his virtues,
imitate his charity, and have the same filial piety towards the Father (cf. Rom
15, 5; Phil 2, 5).
The Faith of
Mary: i. “Porta Fidei”, pp. 22 – 23 (read) ii. When the Faith of God entered into Mary,
that very faith empowered her to answer her great “yes” with a complete hope
for the future. She would be faithful, strong and reliable. The first among the
disciples, the one whose discipleship never fails, the woman who does not deny,
does not betray, does not leave her child and run away. Mary is the virgin
daughter of Israel who bears a Son, who says to the God who calls her to carry
God’s own Son and birth Him in our world. She is the lowly handmaid who will be
called “blessed” by succeeding generations, she has the Faith. Her will is to do
“the command of the eternal God” (Rom 16, 26), even if it means walking the
hard road from Nazareth of Galillee to the place of the Skull outside
Jerusalem. From the Maid of Nazareth she will become the “woman n the hill”,
the woman of faith who replied to the angel Gabriel: “Be it done unto me
according to your word.” The
function of Faith is nowhere more vividly exemplified than in the response of
Mary to the sufferings of her Son Jesus. Jesus’ mother was a daughter of the
nation Judah. She imbibed the innocent suppositions of her people. She
understood that she was to conceive and bear the Messiah. But where were the
proofs? Her Son showed no sign of being
Israel’s saviour; rather, she saw him heading for disaster, seemingly unable to
avert his fate. How could a disgraced, crucified man be the Messiah? The answer
is faith. Only through faith and steadfast loyalty was she able to surrender
her conceptions of the Messiah.
After the Ascension of Jesus, the Beloved disciple John took Mary into
his own. We too take her home and give her pride of place, even though we
humbly admit that our house is not always in order. The brokenness of sin, the
evil of destructive attitudes towards the neighbour, the lusts of the flesh -
all these destroy our homes and make them unfit for our Blessed Mother to live
in. Yet today we shall offer our brokenness to Mary, the Mother of health,
trusting that she will transform them into something beautiful for God.
Health does not mean physical fitness and muscular power; rather, in
the mind of Mary it means the capacity of surrendering our whole selves to God
whatever be the state of health, whether we be on the bed of pain, or
handicapped by injury or ailment or mental torture, we can offer ourselves to
God through Mary. That is health. And those who do so are in very good health.
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Prayer:
O gracious Lady, beloved Mother of God
and our loving Mother, from
where shall we learn Faith if not from you, sweet Maiden who said “Yes” to God’s
invitation to carry the Saviour in your virginal womb, and nurse him at your
breast? You followed him with a mother’s concern right through his ministry,
accompanied him on his cross-laden ascent to Calvary, and became the sorrowing
woman on the hill. Through faith and steadfast loyalty you treasured the
mysteries of Jesus in your heart, and have made them ours, so that whatever
happened to you and Jesus must happen to us: a holy life and happy death in God
and community in him forever. Amen.
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