How far we've come to bolster our faith!

How far we’ve come to bolster our faith!

Of all the spiritual attributes that any one of us found and embraced, it is our faith that too many take for granted.  We always say to those who appear weak when difficulties become troublesome for them, “keep your faith”  or “don’t let your faith leave you.”  Good advice especially coming from any of us whose faith is sound.  Or is it?  

Looking at the three attributes Paul places at the end of his narrative on love; “Faith, hope, and love remain, these three: but the greatest of these is love.”  (1 Cor 13: 13).   However, as each of us has learned about theological virtues, our total attention might pass over faith since the understanding of that being the least to be concerned about.  After all,don’t we say our family prayers, attend Mass frequently, and impress upon others to do the same?  What could be the problem of retaining our faith as a priority? 

Certainly the answers to any of these questions would become easily answered.  Well, let’s surmise what this particular virtue’s reminder seems to elude us.  Each time a scandal, of which too many lately have confronted us, appears, the cries go for change, removal of top clergy, and let’s find another church where these atrocities do not occur.  Maybe that would not happen in your family or the central community to which you put a lot of trust.  

After the scandal with priests abusing children, some of the above cries became loud and pulled a lot of faithful people away from the Church.

There is no doubt that our faith is challenged many times from perhaps only a few exposes’ that are more than some can deal with.  When Jesus was rejected at Nazareth after his first teaching:  “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”    (Lk 4: 21).  Jesus, through his Incarnation, came to earth for this very scripture in Isaiah.  Yet, his faith in his Father’s trust that he would carry out his mission was more than a hope; his faith as the Son of God and a man as well became his battle cry to carry on regardless of what the people said or disbelieved, that he was the Son of God.

So faith is not only accepting what you believe about God and our own faith in what we’ve been handed, it is a trust that we must believe in as challenges will confront us, our understanding of our own mission, and the faith to carry out that ministry in spite of the weaker side of our friends and relatives

Scandals are always difficult to endure, but then God has not put us down because of them.  We are in the protection of the Holy Spirit who will constantly urge us to stand secure in the onrush of evil towards what we believe in.  “Truth:  “What is truth,” asked Pilate to Jesus.  He is Truth and our faith in that alone should be enough to hold secure to ours as well.

Our faith, the one attribute we were given at our creation, is the only vehicle that will bring us closer to God in spite of our weaknesses, the constant barrage of evil that lives all around us, and the grace that God extends to us in spite of our disbelief.  The prayer that says; “Lord I believe, help me in my disbelief.”  is ever more the truth of the human ability to realize how far some of us fall from faith at  times.  We don’t lose faith, we just misplace its meaning.

Ralph B. Hathaway