What is particularly interesting about faith is that most of what we do every day is based on faith, not so much supernatural faith, which is a theological virtue, but natural faith in the sense of accepting as true something somebody tells you because you have evidence that the speaker is well informed about the subject and is honest. We simply could not live without natural faith. For example, we take a prescription to the pharmacist, he or she fills the prescription and we take those pills. Now, unless you understand the intricacies of the science of pharmacology, you don’t really know what you are taking; but we trust first the doctor who prescribed them and we trust that the pharmacist did not make a serious dispensing error. Or, I take my car in for a brake replacement; I am told that it is done, that the car will stop when I press the brake pedal. I trust him; I don’t really know until I get to a red light.
The world of science too relies heavily on natural faith. It is not possible for a scientist to repeat every experiment that has been done in the past. They trust the results of the experiment, that is, they trust that the scientist has not lied to the scientific community by falsifying data, which happens at times. Years ago I was at a Toyota dealership waiting for my car to be fixed when I picked up the Toronto Star and read an article about the British doctor who published a paper in the late 90s that linked the childhood vaccine for measles-mumps-rubella to autism. The study has now been thoroughly discredited, but the final line in the article was the following: “Most scientists are to be trusted. But our systems are not ideal. We just are implicitly trustful of those we work with.”
As a teacher, I realized early on that my students put an awful lot of faith in me, faith that I am not lying to them, that what I am teaching them about history, for example, is actually true. They don’t know, but they believe their teachers. Most of all, relationships are based on faith. When someone tells you “I love you,” you don’t really know that, but you choose to believe them if you are able–some people have been let down so much that they can no longer trust. And so love is risky. Life is full of risk, and it is risk that makes life interesting. If we are completely averse to risk, we will fear relationships, which means we will be too afraid to receive love.
And all this is true as well when it comes to our relationship with God and his relationship to us. It is a relationship of love, and so it is grounded in faith. Supernatural faith in the Person of Christ is accepting as true what he has told us about himself, because we have evidence that he is trustworthy and honest. But of course, it is more personal than that. The Lord invades your life and my life. We do not cross over to him; rather, he comes to us. He reveals himself to you in your deepest interior. That is where he dwells, and he calls you and me to meet him there in that space (Rev 3, 20). To agree to meet him there really is a matter of faith, trust, and risk. And once I discover him there, I can recognize him outside of me, in the Person of Christ who set up his tent among us (Jn 1, 14). He gives me the capacity to risk, to enter into relationship with him, and that capacity is the grace of supernatural faith, and the interior light to which faith gives rise enables me to recognize him in his historical relationship to Israel and in the historical Person of Christ, and we begin to feel at some level that the good of which the natural moral law is an articulation is ultimately a Person, thus to act against that moral law is to act against this Person. At that point, scripture comes alive for us; we know through a supernatural intuition that these pages are not like any other piece of literature. We experience scripture as the word of God. Without that interior meeting, scripture is nothing more to us than literature.
Now, although we cannot cross over to him, that is, although we cannot cultivate supernatural faith on our own natural power, we can, once it is given to us, lose it on our own, by simply choosing not to believe in what God has revealed about himself within us and outside of us in the scriptures, for whatever reason. But to choose to believe in him is an act of love. And that is how we keep the seed of faith from dying out; we have to exercise our faith, practice our faith, and the more we do so, the more we are given understanding.
Understanding is one of the personal gifts of the Holy Spirit. Having that gift does not necessarily mean that we can write an essay on the mysteries of our faith, but we are given a supernatural light by which we understand in a way we may not be able to articulate. St. Augustine often said: “Believe in order to understand,” and not the other way around–some people will not make an act of faith until they arrive at some rational understanding that minimizes the risk. We will only acquire understanding after we make an act of faith and persist in that faith, sort of like a relationship. It is only by trusting in the love that a person says he or she has for us that we eventually realize, through experience, that our trust was well placed. Of course, sometimes that is not the case and we discover that we were lied to and used. The good news is that God cannot lie and is thus completely trustworthy.
I remember a great friend of mine, a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington DC, who came up to visit me in Canada when I was 18 years old. We went to visit the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario, and during a conversation on priesthood and ministry, he said to me: “I’m thinking of leaving the priesthood. I want to get married.” I was shocked and wasn’t sure whether or not he was kidding around, as he often did. Finally, he smiled and said: “Listen, priesthood is the second greatest gift that God has given me. I am not leaving the priesthood.” I was relieved to hear that. But then I wondered: second greatest gift? What’s the first greatest gift? He said: faith. And faith is indeed the greatest gift we have been given. We can be tremendously successful in this world with lots of money in the bank, a large and luxurious cottage, a history of admiration and awards for this, that, and the other thing, but if we die without faith, we have nothing in the end. And the converse is true: we can die in poverty, without property, without a bank account, completely irrelevant and unrecognized, perhaps on medication for a mental illness of one kind or another, but if we die with faith, we die a great success. And that has so often been the case in my ministry to those who suffer from mental illness: many of them have so little in life, but they very often have great faith and a tremendous sense of the divine in their lives.
I know a woman who just turned ninety-nine and lives in the long-term care facility that I visit regularly. She insists the best thing that happened to her in her life was the stroke that had left her paralyzed. She and her husband had lots of money and regularly threw parties for friends, but one day she went to the basement to get some drinks from the fridge and she collapsed. They found her and called 911. She couldn’t move; she was paralyzed. She thought to herself: “My life is over.” She had completely neglected her faith throughout her adult life, but lying in the hospital bed, in darkness and despair, she remembered the words of the Our Father and said them. Suddenly she felt a tremendous peace come over her, and that was the beginning of a new life for her. She is in a wheelchair now, reads constantly, and she brings joy, comfort and hope to so many of the residents in the long-term care home. With faith, our life becomes rich with hope, the hope of eternal life, and it becomes permeated with joy. With faith, the joy of heaven begins now.
Image: Martyrs’ Shrine, Midland, Ontario. By Pjposullivan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35018279
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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