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Search for the Lord

FAITH

What is it?

Faith is the oxygen of religion. It's what we breathe in all our dealings with God. Faith tells us that we are creatures of an intelligent personal godhead revealed to people over the centuries and more specifically in latter times in the person of Jesus Christ. If we could see God in a material way, face to face, then we might not need faith because we would be living with a mathematical or scientific certainty. But the fact is that we are confronted with something so enormous and infinite when we come to talk about God that we cannot "prove" in the conventional way that God exists. We know that God exists from our experience of life and from our shared response as the Church to what Jesus taught and promised.

So does this mean that we have to park our brains at the front door of the church and become spoon-fed and possibly deluded once we become Christians? Of course it doesn't. In a certain sense having faith gives us a greater responsibility to try and come closer to the mystery that is God made visible in Christ. And our growth in faith is a womb to tomb experience. We never graduate in faith. We take the test every day. It's continual assessment. Faith makes demands on us to try and discern a pattern of the way God works in our lives. And if we never question our faith then we will remain childish, not childlike. For our faith has to be adult.

Heads and Tails

There are two sides to the coin of faith.

On the one hand faith means believing that certain things are true. We believe that God exists, that Jesus is the Son of God who became human like us to teach us the way to God, that Christ is present in his word and in his sacraments. In other words, we believe the creed, the set of statements that tell us about God and our relationship with God.

The other side of the coin is about believing in God.  We use the word "in" to suggest that faith is about trusting in what God is all about. Faith is about expectation and reliance, about trusting and hoping. This aspect of faith means that if we believe that God exists then we have to surrender ourselves to God's will. It means abandoning ourselves to the power of God in our lives, knowing that God can and will turn all things to the good. So there is also a "letting go" side to faith. But we don't let go of reality.

Blind Faith?

Our faith, however, is not simply a matter of hoping against hope. We base our faith on what God has revealed to us through the scriptures and the Church.

For St John, faith is about recognising the One sent by God. It means knowing that God loved us first and forgives us even before we turn to him. It means accepting that God can transform us and make us holy if we recognise Jesus as the Messiah who came from God and has returned to his Father.

Sts Peter and Paul remind us that faith requires us to accept this love of God who delivered his Son for the sake of sinners. It means acknowledging that God has raised his Son from the dead and made him Lord. Our faith gives us access to all the promises that Jesus made on behalf of the Father.

So faith is supported by the witness of the scriptures but it is nourished by the words that God speaks to us today in the contemporary events and decisions of our lives. Just as the people at the time of Jesus had to make their choice for him there and then by watching and listening to what he said, or by weighing up the testimony of the apostles and evangelists, so too we have to learn how to listen for God speaking to our modern world in all that happens around us. Faith requires attentiveness to God's word today.

Shared Faith

Faith is not my private possession, like a jewel that I can take our from time to time and enjoy looking at. It is a shared experience. Faith is a gift of God to the Church through baptism. God freely bestows the Holy Spirit on the Church, allowing it to experience present events in the light of God's plan for the world. This free gift of faith integrates us into the people of God and leads us towards that state of holiness that the bible calls righteousness, justice or justification.

When we worship God we proclaim our faith. Our prayers, hymns, songs and readings all announce our intention of living in God's love. For faith is the passport into the Kingdom of God, a state whose values are so at odds with much of what the world prizes that we require faith in order to continue being citizens of this Kingdom. We cannot demand faith, therefore. But we can catch it from those who have it already. And when we've caught it we begin to proclaim it loudly with them.

Faith in the Unseen God

Christ is the image of the unseen God,
the first-born of all creation.
For in him all things were created,
visible and invisible:
thrones, rulers, authorities, powers…
All was made through Christ and for him.
He is the first of all
and all things hold together in him.
He is the head of his body, the Church.
He is also the first to be raised from the dead,
that he may be first in everything.
For God was pleased to let fullness dwell in him.
Through him God wanted to reconcile all things to himself,
and through him, through his blood shed on the cross,
God establishes peace, on earth
just as in heaven.

(Colossians 1: 15-20)

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 HOPE

Hoping against hope?

Hope's a funny word. We use it in so many different ways. We say, "I hope you're not going to throw that brick through the window" when it's pretty obvious that the lad is going to do just that. We say, "I hope I'll win the lottery" when really it is just an idle fourteen million-to-one pipedream. And we say, "She hasn't a hope in hell" when we mean that someone is incapable of achieving what they want.

Hope can appear to be a slightly negative thing, a sort of last resort when everything else fails. In fact we often speak about hoping against hope when we mean that there is very little likelihood of something happening but that we haven't given up on it yet.

Christian hope is none of these things. Christian hope is the natural response to the promises that Christ has made to us from the Father, promises which have God as their guarantor.

Expectation

Christian hope is about expectation, about waiting in joyful hope for something we are sure of. When we talk about hoping in God we are not engaged in some lifelong gamble that may or may not turn up trumps. In talking about life after death our liturgy speaks of the "sure and certain hope of resurrection". Because Christ died for our sins we have the right to expect that we too will be transformed in glory. Hope is waiting for what is due. Whereas optimism is faith in men and women, or in the human potential for good, hope means faith in God and God's power to turn all things to the good. So the virtue of hope is one that sets our spiritual compasses. It orientates us towards a final transformation after which we will become wholly and exclusively love.

Quotes

"I am a man of hope, not for human reasons, nor from any natural optimism, but because I believe the Holy Spirit is at work in the Church and the world even when his name remains unheard."

(Joseph Cardinal Suenens)

"Forgetting what is behind me, and reaching forward to those things which are still to come, I run towards the goal."

(St Paul, Philippians 3:13)

"We must accept finite disappointment but we must never lose infinite hope."

(Martin Luther King)

Virtue

Hope is usually mentioned in the same breath as faith and charity, as one of the three theological virtues. In reality it is difficult to separate hope from faith and charity since they are different aspects of the same thing. Hope springs from faith. If we believe that what God says is true then hope is the natural consequence of our attitude of faith. At the same time, we cannot just have hope in a passive sense. Christian hope is an active seeking of God's kingdom here on earth and provides us with the basis for a life of charity. The way we show that we are hoping in God's promises is by leading keen and loving lives.

Trust

At the heart of our hope, then, is trust. We hope by surrendering ourselves to God's will, to God's acting in every aspect of our lives. We abandon ourselves to the message of Christ, confident that our hope will not delude us. We break loose from what is perishable and attest to eternity in the supreme act of trust. This trust is a joyful thing because it is expectant, attentive and yearning for God's plan to be fulfilled. It is able to see beyond the trials of the present, to grasp something of the immensity of God's love and power. It is a gift, a grace of God, something that we foster and strengthen in prayer.

Persevering in hope

Sir Walter Raleigh wrote these words the night before his execution:

Even such time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shouts up the story of our days,
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.

Ever joyful

Deliver us, Lord, from every evil
and grant us peace in our day.
In your mercy, keep us free from sin
and protect us from all anxiety
as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
(Roman Missal)