Our crisis of faith
We are supposed to be creatures of faith, but I wonder how we are living according to that ideal. We can look around, and we can readily see signs and symptoms that faith is not lived as it should. Faith seems to be in crisis.
Faith is a human necessity. We cannot rely simply on our reason or intelligence, no matter how high it may be. Much less do we solely depend on our senses, no matter how indispensable they are.
We need faith. We need to believe, because we are meant for it. We need faith because we know there's a world beyond what our intelligence can penetrate, and we need to enter it since it's a world to which we belong also.
Our intelligence is more like the moon rather than like the sun. It reflects light, and thus its light is a reflected light. It's not the original source of light. In our system, that light source is the sun. Our problem starts when we make our intelligence like the sun instead of the moon.
Our intelligence emits light insofar as it receives and processes data first from outside itself, and then once it has accumulated some data, it can emit light also from within itself. It has to receive something first, before it can give.
Usually we start using the information we gather from the material world. But from there, it can build its own reservoir of knowledge and can continue reflecting on it, emitting more light along the way.
Still our intelligence can detect that there is still another source of light other than the material world and itself. In fact, this source is the higher and the ultimate one, ever stimulating the mind to catch it but can never quite get it.
It's the world of the spiritual, and more than that, the world of the supernatural, shrouded in mysteries that are truths that surpass our intelligence's capacity to understand. This is where we simply have to believe. Of course, we can also choose not to believe.
This is the world where we are asked to have faith. This is where we are capable of going beyond the limitations of our human condition to merge ourselves into a deeper, richer albeit supernatural reality.
Our problem often is that we get stuck with the sensible and intelligible realities. We ignore the supernatural realities. We prefer to stay on the natural level, failing to see our nature's longing for the supernatural.
We can even go to the extent of claiming that there's nothing supernatural, nothing outside what is natural, what we can understand. But our catechism says:
"The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for." (27)
Obviously, the skepticism about the supernatural world and about faith can stem from the fact that myths and superstitions have very often spoiled if not annulled whatever tendency we may have toward the supernatural.
We are afraid that all talk about faith and the supernatural world may just redound to some subtle human invention or some tricks that our mind and will can play on us, that is, that such claim really has no objective basis, that everything is purely subjective.
This predicament does not totally negate the existence of objective basis for faith and the supernatural world. Rather, it leads us to discern which among the different faith systems truly have an objective basis.
In the case of the Christian faith, it is based on a divine revelation—God coming to us—that is historical, involving a real person and other personages, and events and teachings that can be historically verified. It's not a figment of someone's or a people's imagination.
We need to live by faith. For this we need to learn how to think using not only our reason, but also faith. This requires study and the development of certain habits—like praying, reflecting, recollecting, etc.
The ideal to reach is that we get to develop such a life of faith that would enable us to see God and his ways in all our daily events and activities big and small. We become contemplatives.
This is our crisis of faith. Not so much doctrinal controversies as our indifference to our task to live by faith at every moment.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)