Faith in action

AS persons and children of God, we ought to know that we have to live not only by our senses alone, nor by our reason only. We need to live by faith, not only from time to time, not only in some special moments, but all the time, both in special and ordinary circumstances in our life.

We have to help one another here, because this ideal is admittedly very difficult to attain. For sure, we need nothing less than God’s grace to make this thing happen. But that grace is actually given in abundance. What is lacking is our correspondence, the part we have to play in this shared life of ours with God.

We may need to sit long and reflect thoroughly on this basic truth about ourselves, so that it sinks deep in our consciousness and becomes an operative principle, shaping the way we think, will and love, feel and react to things.

We need to live by faith because it is what properly nourishes our spiritual faculties, and links us to the supernatural world, the world of God to where we ultimately belong. Actually, not only ultimately, but constantly, since our life, even while on earth, is not meant only to be purely natural. It is meant to be supernatural as well.

That’s simply because we are meant to be with God. We come from him and we belong to him, just like everything else. Except that in our case, we belong to him in a very intimate way by participating in his very own life. That’s God’s will for us before it is ours. And we have been given the faculties to enable us to reach this goal.

With our intelligence and will, actuated by God’s grace and not just working on their own natural powers, we are capable of being lifted up to the supernatural order of God. This, in philosophy, is called “obediential potency,” the power to be raised up to the supernatural order because of their spiritual character.

Those creatures that are purely material do not have this capacity to be raised up to the supernatural order. Our spiritual powers enable us to enter God’s life because we can want it and can be conscious of it. With God’s grace, that possibility is actualized.

So we need to live by faith, the beginning of a life with God that is consciously wanted by us. For this purpose, we need to learn how to think and want always in faith. Even when we are dealing with very mundane and earthly concerns, we have to know how to relate them with God and vice-versa.

This is actually not difficult to do, even if it requires some abiding training. We can always start by realizing that everything that we handle, everything that we see and touch, observe and experience, comes from God and ought to belong to God.

We may have to exert a little effort to keep that awareness going, but it’s an effort that is truly worthwhile. Because if that is always the frame of mind that we have, then all the developing, the spinning and the weaving that we do in our activities will likely be guided by God and done for God.

Our usual problem is that we dare to launch things on our own. God may only appear in the beginning, or in some special moments of the process, but there comes a point when we detach ourselves from him. If ever, we make God more as an ornament, a prop, a security blanket, but not as he truly is for us, that is, our everything.

What can be implied here is that we can consider God as a competitor of our own freedom, and even of our own life. We can arrive at the point where we make the crazy choice of either doing things with God as they should be, or doing things just by ourselves.

We may not be aware of this predicament mainly because of our weaknesses. What we need to do is to immerse ourselves in the things of God, by praying or talking to him, studying his doctrine and be increasingly familiar with his word and mind, loving and doing good to everyone, availing of the sacraments, waging interior struggle, etc.

This is how faith grows and matures in us until that point where with St. Paul we can say we “attain the unity of the faith and of the deep knowledge of the Son of God, to perfect manhood.”