Everyone lives their lives by faith. We rise and drive to work each day with the unspoken faith that today an auto accident will not claim our lives, or that a workplace accident will not cause a severe injury. We make plans for the next day, and the next week, in the faith that we will not be struck down by illness. Hundreds of thousands of people discover each year that their faith was misplaced, yet we continue to act in faith because we cannot effectively live our lives fearing something over which we have no control.
There are very few certainties in life. Faith is our commitment to act in that world of uncertainty.
When the Church speaks of faith, however, they mean something more than an unconscious pretense that things will be as we need them to be instead of how they really are. Rather, faith is understood as a deliberate act of the will, a commitment to live in the universe as if it were one filled with meaning, purpose and love, rather than the random, meaningless universe it might be.
In the Paradiso, Dante reaches the sphere of the fixed stars–that is, the constellations, where he is questioned about faith by St. Peter. Until now, Dante has been able to rely on reason founded in empirical experience, but this is insufficient in heaven. Dante’s entire pilgrimage from the gates of Hell to here, has been a process of learning to see things as they really are. We cannot do that in the mortal realm, he explains to Saint Peter; we must rely on faith.
Everyone has beliefs, and we live our lives based on those beliefs, even if we never clearly articulate and define them. Josef Ratzinger (late Pope Benedict) wrote in his Introduction to Christianity: “Every man must adopt some kind of attitude to the basic questions, and no man can do this in any other way than that of entertaining belief.”
Faith thus has two parts: the commitment (the faith with which I believe), and the content (the faith in which I believe). Each time we say to our spouse, “I love you” we are professing an act of faith. It is at once a statement of belief—that I love you—and a commitment to act—to strive for your good without regard for how it benefits me. We prove our faith when our actions demonstrate our commitment to the claim that we love.
In Christianity, faith involves putting confidence and hope in God. In marriage, faith involves putting confidence and hope in both your spouse and yourself. In the ideal of the Christian marriage, your faith in yourself and your spouse is sustained and bolstered by your faith in God.
Without faith, there can ultimately be no marriage, and no love. Faith is, in the words of Wojciech Giertych “an indispensable tool” for acting in the world with love.
Faith requires no evidence for belief nor practice. The very nature of faith surmises that tangible evidence may not exist.
Comments