How to Grow Faith

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Even with 20 years of formal Catholic education, I’ve struggled with faith most of my adult life. Does God exist? Was Jesus really God? Am I fooling myself about God, Jesus, life after death?

I know I’m not alone. I suspect the vast majority of people of faith have similar doubts. But doubt doesn’t constitute an absence of faith. Everyone has a different way of approaching this problem. Here are my thoughts on the matter of faith and doubt.

First, I believe that faith isn’t just a question of the mind. We probably make most of our decisions - even the most important one, like the question of belief - based on emotion or a mix of emotion and reason. And that mix makes me and millions of others come down on the side of faith.

Accepting Uncertainty

Secondly, faith means accepting uncertainty, which doesn’t seem a problem in other aspects of our lives. Uncertainty is as pervasive as air. People we were certain were loyal friends turn out not to be. Before Einstein, Newton’s physics were certain. Almost daily revelations show we can never be certain about the effectiveness and safety of medications.

Third, faith is incremental. Jesus acknowledged as much when he used the analogy of the mustard seed. We need to act on whatever “amount” of faith we have and be grateful for it.

So if we have some degree of faith – if only the size of a mustard seed, which is no larger than the period at the end of the next sentence – how do we keep it and grow it? The point of Jesus’ analogy, I believe, is that even a minimal amount of faith is enough to believe that “anything is possible.”

Prayer, it seems to me, is the best start. If we believe in God, even with doubt, we should ask him/her to help us believe. And prayer, wrote the great mystic Teresa of Avila, “is nothing but friendly intercourse, and frequent converse, with him who we know loves us.”

Those in the Judeo-Christian tradition should read the Bible. Christians could start with something easy, like the Acts of the Apostles and graduate to the gospels and the letters of Paul. In the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, at least the early chapters, is also relatively easy to read.

Besides that, we should look for what will support our faith: articles, books, movies, TV shows, plays, conversations, friends. God knows there is plenty to influence us in the opposite direction.

Research has shown that many Christians, at least, depend on the knowledge of their faith they learned in elementary school. The rest of their knowledge may have grown exponentially but their faith is stuck in the rudiments, with a child’s understanding in an age when an adult’s understanding is needed like never before.

That’s not to say that believers need a formal education. Neither the prophets nor Jesus mentioned having an academic degree, but in an age when knowledge in every other aspect of our lives is exploding, having a child’s grasp of our faith is an obstacle, for us and those with whom we come into contact.

Insight

Fr. Herbert McCabe, an English theologian and philosopher who died in 2001, has some insight on the subject of faith.

“Faith,” he wrote, “is about what is beyond the horizon of the humanly possible. Faith is exploring into what people could never achieve by themselves. Faith is the mysterious need in us to get to where we could surely never go.

“Faith, in fact, is about what we call God. Faith is the inkling that we are meant to be divine, that our journey will go beyond any horizon at all into the limitlessness of the Godhead. Faith is not our power to set out on this journey into the future. It is our future laying hold on us. …Faith is not something we possess. It is something by which we are possessed.”

I still ask myself all those doubting questions mentioned at the start of this blog, but not as frequently as before. And I can attest that faith does indeed bring peace and joy.