Faith is a completely different way to live our life and to perceive our surroundings. One of my favorite images to explain faith comes from the first Star Wars movie. Luke is practicing with his light saber and his mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi, forces him to do it blind so that he can practice being attuned with the Force. As Christians, we do not believe in the Force, but the experience is as removed from our ordinary experience as living faithfully is from being tied completely to our ordinary perception of things.
Faith is Ordained to Charity
Jordan Aumann writes that “faith is ordained to charity.” We are called to grow in faith because it makes us live charity better. This is one of the primary ends of Christian life, to live charity towards God and towards others. Christ wants us to learn to love. Faith and love go together. Love is not merely a sum of a lot of emotions. True love needs faith and it cannot be fully expressed without deep love. Too often, we have a poor image of faith. We think that faith is simply “believing in God.”
The apostle James wrote in his letter
You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble (James 2:19).
Faith cannot be reduced to intellectual assent to truth. It is much more than that and plays a large role in our lives. Faith is not saying simply that God exists. Faith has to make a difference in our lives. We can look at faith under three headings: trusting other people, trusting ourselves, and faith in God.
Trusting Other People
Trusting other people can be challenging because we have all faced betrayal and disappointment. Too many children in our society begin life with tremendous disappointment because some of their closest family members fail in their most fundamental obligations towards them. This can set them up with some profound wounds that make it hard trust other people. How do you believe when someone tells you “I’ll be there,” if those words were a lie for you growing up?
Then, many of us face betrayal. This can happen within a romantic relationship in the form of cheating. This is heartbreaking and makes us doubt our self-worth. It can also happen when someone we love, trust, and admire, turns out to be completely different than who we thought. This too, challenges our trust in other people. Trusting others is no easy task.
Trusting Ourselves
If we are honest, however, neither is it easy to trust ourselves. We have plenty of reasons to doubt ourselves. When we make New Years’ resolutions, only to fail the first week of January. We recognize our own lack of authenticity. I remember telling a lie once to cover up the fact that I had not finished a task I was assigned. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted my own lack of honesty.
We promise ourselves we are going to get healthy by eating right and being active, but we disappoint ourselves over and over again. All of this challenges our faith in ourselves.
Faith in God
What should be easiest, but is often the hardest task, is to have faith in God. This does not merely to express belief that God exists. There are plenty of reasons to think that so perhaps that belief does not seem so difficult. However, it is easy to ascribe the wounds we suffer in life to the lack of attention or care on God’s part. We blame God and this makes it hard to believe in him in a way that implies complete and total trust.
Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed. As personal adherence to God and assent to his truth, Christian faith differs from our faith in any human person. It is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and to believe absolutely what he says. It would be futile and false to place such faith in a creature (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 150).
Living faithfully is hard, but when we accomplish it, it changes our way of seeing the world. Just like Luke Skywalker who discovers how to navigate with the power of the Force and this leads to him being the great hero; when we walk by faith, we learn to see things as they truly are and we are able to navigate this world and our existence much more effectively. Faith is life-giving. If you want to grow in your meaning in life, grow in faith.
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