From unbelief to belief

ST. Thomas, one the apostles. Yes, the doubting Thomas. Relish his words, “My Lord and my God!” They portray that dramatic, very sharp turn from unbelief to belief. May these words be also on our lips, always, and shot from a heart burning with faith and love, ever fresh and dripping with desire.

     

      We need to take care of our faith. We cannot take this duty for granted, especially now when the world is sinking in confusion and error as it distances itself farther from God.

     

      In many places in the world today, people are now legalizing and inculturating outright immoralities and perversions, rationalizing them as part of their human rights, their freedom, or as a gesture of tolerance on a multiplicity of preferences, etc.

     

      This is a big challenge for all Christian believers who want to be all-the-way consistent with their faith and with humanity itself, for the issues at hand are not just a matter of a particular religion but rather that of our common humanity.

     

      And the Christian faith is not meant only for a few. It is for all, though it obviously is not meant to be imposed on everyone. It has to be accepted knowingly, freely, lovingly.

     

      Its specificity precisely defines what is to be human, what is to be a real person, a creature and child of God. Its specificity goes beyond merely material categories as happens with our human sciences that measure things according to atoms, cells, tissues, wavelengths, or in social, economic or political terms.

      

      It enters the spiritual, comparing and distinguishing, as St. Paul once said, spiritual with spiritual (cfr 1 Cor 2,13), for in the spiritual world there are also good and true spirits, and the bad and fake ones. This is an aspect of reality that is still hardly known by most people.

     

      It’s a faith that is not invented by any man, but rather one revealed in its fullness by the Son of God who became man, Jesus Christ. It’s not just an accumulation of human or popular wisdom gathered through the ages. It is from above, from God. It is supernatural adapted to our nature that has been created in God’s image and likeness.

     

      The truths of faith go beyond natural effectiveness. They go beyond our concern for practicality, convenience, and other worldly and passing goals. They are what bring us to eternity, a yearning we have at the bottom of our heart.

     

      Faith also contains mysteries that are truths that go beyond our capacity to understand. They simply have to be believed, more than understood, even as they invite and stimulate us to study and understand them further, without ever fully comprehending them.

     

We need to have the proper attitude toward faith. We cannot treat it the way we handle the sciences and the arts. It requires humility, docility and trust. It requires an underlying belief, even if this belief is not very strong, that there is a supreme being who is over and above all of us and who is in control of everything in our life.

            From there we can start to study the doctrine of our faith, now carefully and authoritatively articulated by the Church’s teaching office that in turn is endowed with appropriate power by God himself through Christ.

            We have to realize that the doctrine of our faith is not just a set of words or theories, nor a system of ideas, an ideology made up of different principles, but rather and organic and life-giving set of truths that have to be accepted not only intellectually, but rather by the whole man. It’s meant to transform us radically, at our heart.

            It’s important that we get to have a good global picture of the nature and character of faith so we would also know how to receive, keep and develop it. Our usual problem is that we have a painfully reductive understanding of it, and so we tend to correspond inadequately to its demands and requirements.

            We also need to understand that for our faith to grow, it also has to be nourished by the other two theological virtues of hope and charity. These three—faith, hope and charity—actually always go together. The growth of each one of them can be caused by an impulse of the other two. Growing in the other virtues should come as a consequence.

            Lastly, we have to realize that faith grows through the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist, because it’s through them that we receive Christ who precisely comes to redeem us.