WE need to
understand that our Christian faith is first of
all God’s gift to us to enable us to have the possibility
of sharing
the supernatural life of God, of whom we have been
created as his
image and likeness. That’s how God wants us to be.
That gift of
faith is, of course, adapted to our human
condition, especially to the aspect of our woundedness.
It is meant to
redeem us, to recover us and to reconcile us with God.
While we have
to correspond to it duly and as fully as
possible, we have to understand that the initiative comes
from God
first. Ours is only to reciprocate to it, much like the
moon
reflecting the light of the sun. This is, of course, no
mean thing
either, because what is involved should be our whole
selves in the
full use of our God-given faculties and powers.
But let us just
make sure that in our effort to correspond
to this divine gift of faith, we do not commit the
mistake of making
it too human and natural as to undermine or even negate
its original
supernatural character.
This can happen
when our understanding of faith includes
the possibility of understanding everything in it with
our reason and
other ways of human estimation alone. We do not anymore
believe that
there can be mysteries and that our ultimate goal of
being the image
and likeness of God can be achieved with our human
efforts alone.
It can also
happen that our understanding of fidelity to
our Christian faith means rigidly sticking to the literal
articulation
of the doctrine of our faith, negating the possibility of
adaptation,
innovation, deepening and further development of the
doctrine.
That would mean
that the Holy Spirit has stopped prompting
us or that we have no more need for the Holy Spirit since
we believe
that we already know everything even as we go through the
changing
situations in time.
By keeping our
faith always supernatural can mean that we
always have need to deepen our knowledge of it through
constant study
and meditation, trying to discern what the Holy Spirit is
trying to
prompt us, always allowing the possibility that He can
prompt us with
something that is quite radical but still homogeneous
with the old,
traditional understanding of our faith.
By keeping our
faith always supernatural can also mean
that aside from all the human and natural means to deepen
our
understanding of our faith, we really need to make use of
the
spiritual and supernatural means of prayer, sacrifice and
recourse to
the sacraments. Yes, we need to study individually and
collectively,
make consultations and discussions, but we also need to
give priority
to the spiritual and supernatural means.
This is how we
can detect more clearly what the Holy
Spirit is telling us in every moment and in every epoch
with its
characteristic general circumstances. Otherwise, our
faith would
degenerate into a mere human ideology which, definitely,
can have some
good and correct points, but would not have the proper
spirit.
As such, that
faith turned into a human ideology can
present us with some brilliant ideas that can mislead us
more than
lead us properly to our true end. This is something we
have to be most
careful about.
And for this
purpose, we really would need to be humble so
that we would always see the priority of the spiritual
and
supernatural means over the human and natural. And that
our study,
articulation and proclamation of our faith would always
be marked by
prudence and we would be more certain that we are being
guided by the
Holy Spirit more than just our dominant human interests
at the moment.
This, of
course, is no easy thing to do. So, we just have
to move really slowly but steadily, trusting always in
God’s loving
providence over us.
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