Be consistent to your faith

WE have to appeal to everyone, especially to our politicians and everybody else who occupy positions of leadership and influence in society, to please be consistent to your faith.

Faith is not something to show off only when one is in church and in religious activities. It has to be lived all the time regardless of whether one is engaged in business or in politics or in sports or in the arts, etc.

It can not be treated like a hat or a coat that we wear outside but take off when we are inside the house, or in Congress, or in work or party. When our Catholic congressmen tackle, for example, the RH Bill, they just cannot say they have to set their faith aside because they are doing only secular things. That’s foul!

True, they have to consider with as much scientific rigor as possible the different human angles and natural aspects of the issue—social, political, economic, cultural, practical, etc. But all these should be infused by faith.

Without faith, these considerations would lose their proper bearing and stability. They would be vulnerable to changing conditionings and will ultimately do harm to us.

We obviously have to live our faith with naturalness, without attracting undue attention and without allowing it, as much as possible, to hamper our normal daily activities. But we have to understand that faith has to be lived always. We should try to avoid having gaps of faith in our day.

Faith is actually the soul of our knowledge, what gives life, guidance and direction to our reasoning. We have to be wary when we tend to detach our intelligence from our faith. That would leave our intelligence out in the cold, neglected and abandoned to survive on its own.

Faith is actually a necessity for our reason. The latter cannot go far without the former. Reason would be violating its own nature if it dares to go on its own, since it knows that it always needs an outside object to start it to act. The autonomy of reason never means it is separated from faith, or worse, incompatible and hostile to faith.

Though reason has an immanent activity, it always needs to be fed by things outside it. Otherwise, it will grind to a halt or worse, drown in its own unpurified, unrenewed waste.

And reason just cannot stop at depending on sensible and intelligible objects for it to work. It has to go all the way. Sooner or later reason will reach the limits of the material world, then enters into the world of ideas, and if it’s true to itself, it will realize it is in the threshold of the spiritual and supernatural universe. It cannot escape but reach the point of transcendence.

So our reason just can stop at the human and natural sciences, nor in our philosophies and ideologies. Without suspending its operation, it has to allow itself to be taken up by the wings of faith.

That’s because to cruise in the transcendent levels, reason needs faith. That is to say, we need to make an act of faith, which is an act of the will that kind of forces our reason to go on in spite of its inadequacy to tackle the truths and mysteries involved in the spiritual and supernatural world.

We actually make acts of faith one way or another, even in our most ordinary activities and situations. This is because our reason cannot cope with all the things presented to it for consideration. Nor can it go deep enough in the knowledge of even the most ordinary things in our life.

Thus, faith is to be lived not just when we tackle purely spiritual topics and issues, abstract and abstruse, but also in our day-to-day mundane concerns. For even the most ordinary things possess mysterious realities. In them can always be found God himself. And for that, reason is not enough. Faith is needed.

Faith never diminishes what is truly human in us. Rather, it enhances our humanity, it purifies it, elevates it to its spiritual and supernatural goal, and brings it to its most profound and sublime level.

We, and especially our leaders, have to learn how to be at home with faith, skilful enough to animate every human activity we do in the different fields of our life, be it business or politics or the arts, etc.

We have to break the barrier that prevents us from allowing our faith to animate all our affairs.