I've worn glasses for most of my life now, but I still remember the first day that I wore a pair home from the doctor's office. I was about eight years old at the time. As we drove home, turning from Route 5 onto Whirlwind Road, I was struck by all of the details that I could see from a distance for the first time. Each tree was not just an blurry blob of green, but an arrangement of intricate leaves. The wisp of each cloud had new, breathtaking definition. I don't recall exactly what I said to my Mom at the time, but it was something like, “Is this how everyone else sees?”
Just as my glasses help me to see the world as it truly is, faith in Christ helps us to perceive truths that we could not otherwise know. The encyclical Lumen Fidei, drafted by Pope Benedict XVI and promulgated by Pope Francis, says beautifully, “Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing.” In my last article, I explained that we need the three so-called theological virtues - faith, hope, and charity - to prepare our hearts for heaven. In this article, I'd like to reflect briefly on the first of those virtues, faith.
The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, says the following:
25. How does man respond to God who reveals himself?
Sustained by divine grace, we respond to God with the obedience of faith, which means the full surrender of ourselves to God and the acceptance of his truth insofar as it is guaranteed by the One who is Truth itself.
386. What is the virtue of faith?
Faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and all that he has revealed to us and that the Church proposes for our belief because God is Truth itself. By faith the human person freely commits himself to God. Therefore, the believer seeks to know and do the will of God because “faith works through charity” (Galatians 5:6).
28. What are the characteristics of faith?
Faith is the supernatural virtue which is necessary for salvation. It is a free gift of God and is accessible to all who humbly seek it. The act of faith is a human act, that is, an act of the intellect of a person - prompted by the will moved by God - who freely assents to divine truth. Faith is also certain because it is founded on the Word of God; it works “through charity” (Galatians 5:6); and it continually grows through listening to the Word of God and through prayer. It is, even now, a foretaste of the joys of heaven.
Faith, then, is not just a vague acceptance that God exists, but a response to the God who has become man and revealed himself in Jesus Christ. By faith, we surrender ourselves to the Lord and to everything that he has revealed in Scripture and Tradition, as authoritatively interpreted by the Church, allowing his Word to transform the way that we look at our own lives and at the world around us. By faith, for example, we discover that God is love, that we reject this love through sin, but that Jesus offers us reconciliation with God through his death and Resurrection. Through the lens of faith, we can see our need for inner conversion and can begin to know God and to love him, finding in him the happiness for which we were created. Without faith, these essential truths about the meaning of our lives and the path to eternal life remain hidden from our sight.
I recently reread an insightful book called From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age, which reflects upon the cultural shifts that we have experienced in recent decades. One of the observations that the book makes is that every culture, including our own, has a shared “imaginative vision,” a set of spiritual and moral assumptions through which our lives are lived and interpreted. In eras of “Christendom,” when the collective values and social narratives were more-or-less Christian and supported life in the Church, the average person would by default view the world through a Christian lens. Concepts of God, angels, demons, holiness, sin, heaven, and hell once saturated the culture and were absorbed by most- even if imperfectly - as if by osmosis. In our own secular age, however, spiritual ideas - especially Christian ones - have been systematically scrubbed from our common culture, so that it is relatively easy for many to live their lives without thinking about God at all. Our secular age dismisses concepts like holiness, sin, repentance, divine providence, and eternal judgment as superstition, relying instead on material concepts like economics, political power, technology, and biology.
The problem, of course, is not that our age focuses on such things, but that it focuses exclusively on such things. It's as if we are walking through life looking only at our feet, refusing to raise our eyes above the horizon to see the towering trees or the radiant sky. By attempting to exclude spiritual things from the public square, our culture neglects the very reason for our existence, which is communion with God in this life and in the next.
To be people of faith today, then, each of us needs to learn to look at our lives and the world around us differently. We need to immerse ourselves in the Word of God, allowing the truths that Jesus Christ has revealed to transform the way that we think and act. This is the essence of biblical conversion, in Greek, metanoia. As Pope Francis said of the Greek word in a homily last year:
Composed of the preposition metá, which here means “beyond”, and the verb noéin, “to think”, it tells us that to convert is to “think beyond”, to go beyond our usual ways of thinking, beyond our habitual worldview. All those ways of thinking that reduce everything to ourselves, to our belief in our own self-sufficiency.
Faith allows us to see our dependence on God and to learn to surrender to him and to his revelation, through the grace that Jesus provides. Such transformative faith is absolutely essential for our eternal life. As Hebrews 11:6 says, “But without faith it is impossible to please him, for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” Jesus himself boldly proclaimed, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:16)
In the next article in this series, we'll turn our attention to the second of the theological virtues - hope.