How to Grow Faith  


Google Image
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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Gospel of The Little Prince

Image
  Attention all those concerned only with “matters of great consequence:” Is it possible that you’ve become someone you didn’t want to be, having strayed far from the innocence and simplicity of childhood? That’s the main question asked in The Little Prince, which Netflix, the streaming video service, has added to its repertoire of movies and TV shows. Though not a big fan of animated flicks, I was a big fan of the book, The Little Prince, back in the 1970s when it became extremely popular in the U.S. It was first published in French and English in New York in 1943 as a novella by French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery , who disappeared while piloting a Free French Army plane the following year over the Mediterranean Sea. Nearly Two Million Copies “The novella is the fourth most-translated book in the world and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France,” says Wikipedia. “Translated into more than 250 language...
Read more

‘Spiritual but Not Religious,’ Revisited

Image
Google Image I’ve expressed several times in these blogs my skepticism about declarations by some of our contemporaries that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Much of the skepticism results from the false dichotomy this entails, as if the spiritual and religious are mutually exclusive. Spirituality, after all, is the whole point of being religious. With the exception of some forms of Buddhism, all the major religions aim to bring people closer to God, who is “spiritual.” St. Paul, among the earliest leaders of Christianity, wrote that he is imparting a teaching “not taught by human wisdom but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.” But Daniel Horan, Franciscan priest, theologian and author, wrote in a recent edition of the National Catholic Reporter: “What if our starting point in thinking about what it means to be a person in communion with God, oneself and the world was not reduced to external expressions of institutional belo...
Read more

Clinging to Archie Bunker's God

Image
Google Image Archie Bunker, the character masterfully played by the late Carroll O’Conner in the 1970s TV comedy “All in the Family,” had his own take on the traditional Christian doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. “God don’t make no mistakes,” declared Archie. “That’s how he got to be God.” For those too young to remember Archie, who in 2005 was listed as number 1 on Bravo's 100 Greatest TV Characters, Wikipedia says Bunker was characterized by his bigotry towards “… blacks, Hispanics, "Commies," gays, hippies, Jews, Asians, Catholics, "women's libbers," and Polish-Americans….” Bunker was presented as a Christian, however, and “… often misquotes the Bible. He takes pride in being religious, although he rarely attends church services ….” An Anonymous Contributor Sister Mary Matilda, my eighth grade teacher, would accuse me of being uncharitable but I imagine that an anonymous contributor to a recent newspaper column is an “Archie Bunke...
Read more