Some of the most important words are hardest to define. Do you know what ‘beauty’ means? Sure you do. Okay, then define it. Whatever you say, you’ll probably end by scratching your head and saying, “no, that didn’t quite capture it.” Or take my personal favorite, “love.” Define “love.” You can talk and talk, but at the end you’ll still feel that your definition leaves something out.
“Faith” is one of those words. If I ask you to define it, you might stumble around a little. Go around asking other people to define “faith” and you’ll get lots of different answers.
I heard one definition just this week in a Bruce Hornsby song: “Faith is a crutch, but whatever works for you.” That’s a perfect expression of what many people think faith is: they’d say that faith boils down to a pleasant fiction, a pretty lie, a coping mechanism. This might lead to a benign relativism: "You believe in Jesus? Cool, man, if that’s what helps get you through the night." "You’re a Hindu? Hey, if that works for you, more power to you." On the other hand, it can take a hostile turn: the militant atheist who is so desperate to wake us up from our "pathetic medieval superstitions." In any case, the idea here is that Faith is not about what’s true, not about what’s actually Real. It’s about us finding a way to deal with things.
Just about the most powerful expression of this view I’ve ever found is the novel, now the movie, The Life of Pi. Without spoiling it, I can tell you that the moral of the story is that believing in God has nothing to do with whether God is real, but is simply something we do because it’s the only way to cope. It’s a lie we tell ourselves to deal with life.
I’m afraid that this outlook on faith can sometimes be found among religious people. Why are you Catholic? “Well this is how I was raised and I’ll never turn my back on the way I was raised.” In other words, I am Catholic for precisely the same reason, and in precisely the same way, that I am a Cardinals fan. That kind of loyalty is fine for baseball, but really doesn’t work for religion.
How about this instead? "I’m Catholic because I’ve encountered Jesus Christ, because both history and my own experience convince me that He founded this Church and sustains her still today, because I’ve felt His life pouring into me through her Sacraments, because I’ve found in her tradition treasures of wisdom and insight unmatched by anything else, because it is not unreasonable but more reasonable than anything else, because it is the key that fits the lock of my life and my heart and my deepest questions, and because I know that the more I turn away from her, the more I turn away from Jesus."
Now you might not have all those words ready at the tip of your tongue, but I hope that’s why you’re Catholic. If the real, honest reason you’re here boils down to inertia, to being comfortable here, to the same kind of loyalty you might have to a baseball team, I’m still glad you’re here! But I’m challenging you to grow into something more mature, more reasoned, more profound. Start with the Catechism or some of those CD’s in the back of church or come into my office and tell me you’d like some spiritual reading. Start praying a rosary every day, or attending First Friday Holy Hours. There are a million first steps you can take; the main thing is to get moving. The Holy Spirit will handle it from there. You’ll be amazed at the treasures that have been hiding in plain sight all this time. I had a dream once that I found a staircase I’d never noticed in my grandparents’ house. I knew that house well, I knew every corner of it... I thought. But all along I'd been missing the greater part of it. It turned out that what I thought was an average house was really a magnificent, gigantic castle. I wondered how I’d gone so long without ever exploring, without even noticing that staircase. The Catholic tradition is like that.
You and I live in a time that calls for radical Faith. We’ve had way too much religion as therapy. Way too much religion as entertainment. Way too much religion as beige, watered-down, feel-good sentimentalism. Now I’m going to talk about something that might be a little touchy. I’ve prayed that I don’t mess it up too bad. I don’t mind offending people if it’s Christ that they find offensive, but I don’t want to offend people because just because I’m a lousy communicator. But I’m called ‘Father’, and sometimes fathers have to point out, in all love and gentleness, the way things are.
Here’s the way things are: in the Catholic Church in America in 2013, the default position is to pick and choose the doctrines you like. That’s what people see as normal, what people expect of us. I’ll take a big helping of serving the poor, thank you, but I’m going to support abortion. Or: sign me up for pro-life, right on, but don’t ask me to have anything to do with the poor. Or: I’ll sign up for almost all this stuff, looks pretty good, seems about right, but you’ve got to be kidding about not using contraception! Natural Family Planning? What’s that? Never mind, I don’t really care. Sounds complicated. Sounds hard. Many Catholics don’t even feel the slightest need to investigate what the Church teaches before they dissent. So they settle for belief that is mostly Catholic. Not living together or sleeping together until bound by a Sacramental Covenant in marriage? Seriously? This is 2013. Refusing to let my 401k contain anything that causes me to profit from pornography? Can that even be done? Come on, let’s be realistic here, Father. You should be grateful that we’re on board with most of Catholicism.
Well, you could pick a thousand different doctrines. What I want you to know is, again, if this is you, I’m glad you’re here. I’m not judging you. I respect that you are where you are. None of us were born with a perfect understanding and a well-informed assent to every Catholic belief. And certainly, nobody is claiming to be a perfect Catholic. It’s my job to speak for the Church, and the Church never imposes; she only proposes. She invites. And I’m inviting you to take a plunge into Catholicism. Unabridged, unfiltered Catholicism. All of Catholicism. Many Catholics may never have really been challenged about this. I’ve known Catholics who really had no idea that anybody actually believed everything the Church teaches, because she teaches it, and because she speaks for Christ.
I’ll be a little risky and share a personal witness, and it’s about that contraception issue I mentioned earlier. I started college believing the same as most American Catholics. I was fully comfortable in my certainty that the Church’s teaching was, basically, crazy. It did not bother me one bit that I’d made zero effort to understand it. I didn’t find it strange that I would dissent from the Faith I claimed to profess without ever reading a single thing explaining it. I was passionate and committed to the Catholicism that I didn’t even believe all of, and that didn’t strike me as odd. I was willing to be patient with the Church because, you know, the Church moves slowly and we have to give her time to get with the program and come around to our point of view.
The day came when this inconsistency did start to bother me. The martyrs died for this Faith. What makes me think I can pick it apart and choose what I like? If the Holy Spirit is behind this, what makes me think I know better? If the Holy Spirit isn't behind it, why am I eager to associate myself with a gigantic 2000-year lie? And how can the Church teach something so obviously crazy? What in the world is she thinking? And what about the Gospels gave me the idea that following Jesus wouldn’t ever be really, really hard?
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| Their statistical methods are laughable and mistaken, but closer to the truth than is comfortable. |
So I started to read. I read Paul VI's Humanae Vitae. I read John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” and "Love and Responsibility." I read the Catechism, encyclicals, I asked questions. It took quite some time, but by the end I was totally convinced. Before I got there I had to unlearn everything I’d absorbed in 20 years of MTV culture. I had to tear down to the very roots of my understanding of love and physicality.
But here's the thing: I wasn’t just convinced, I was blown away. Love and intimacy were so much more amazing and beautiful then I’d ever realized. Women were so much more amazing and beautiful than I’d ever appreciated. The same went for my own masculinity. I was singing with Psalm 139, “I praise you, Lord, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” Back then I didn’t know if I was called to priesthood or to marriage or to another way of serving God, but I was way more excited about any of them. It was like finding a new staircase I'd never noticed in a house I'd thought I knew.
I think there’s a crucial point to be made here. Faith is first and foremost not about believing in certain propositions, but about a relationship to a Person. We don’t really place our faith in something, but in someone. To understand this, let’s look at what’s close to us, our human relationships. Someone tells you, “I love you.” You say, “I love you, too.” Now in this moment, I’d argue, what is required is an act of faith. Faith is entrusting yourself to another, taking a plunge; it’s why we speak of a “leap of Faith.” Without that, you can’t have a relationship with the other. If someone says “I love you,” and your response is “prove to me that that is true,” you will never bridge that gap between persons. Real love, real giving of yourself, requires you to take a leap beyond what you can prove, beyond what you can demonstrate, beyond what you’ve experienced before. And that leap, that plunge, that act of Faith, brings you to something higher as a friend, a lover, a companion.
I don’t think Faith in God is so different. It’s not believing without reason, but taking a leap into a relationship. It’s saying “I love you, too,” rather than “Prove it!” And it’s validated, it’s affirmed by finding ourselves caught up in a relationship. The leap is necessary, but the leap isn’t the point. The point of leaping is to land on something. Or, better, the point of leaping is to be caught by Someone.
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Sean Cardinal O’Malley of Boston told a story about a relief worker in a refugee camp somewhere in Africa. He was working the food line and they were running out. These people were desperately hungry, and that made them desperately dangerous. As the food dwindled, the situation grew more chaotic and scary. Finally there was one banana left. The worker braced for a riot. Instead, the chaos and struggle stopped. They handed the banana to a nine-year girl. She broke it in half. She gave one half to her younger sister. She gave the other half to her younger brother. And she began to lick the peel. In that moment, the worker said, he began to believe in God.
That was not about agreeing to an idea. It was about accepting a relationship with Someone whose presence had been encountered. Faith never asks us to abandon Reason. It never asks us to turn off our brains and just believe something for no reason. Faith is a leap into a relationship, an act of trust. And that leap is a very reasonable thing to do. In a world this beautiful, created by a God this amazing, it’s the only reasonable thing to do. It’s understandable that so many Catholics are afraid to go all in, to get radical, to join all us crazy nut-jobs who really, actually believe what the Church teaches as the revelation of Jesus Christ. But in making that leap you find out that you’ve leapt not into craziness, not into unreason, but into a relationship with the One who is Truth.
In the Pope’s new encyclical on Faith, he ends by holding up the example of Mary, and I’ll do the same. She’s our best example, our best teacher. Her openness to God was complete. She held nothing back. And if someone ever does ask you to define 'faith,' you would do well enough to simply point to her. The Pope’s last words are a prayer, a plea for her intercession:
“Mother, help our faith!
Open our ears to hear God’s word and to recognize his voice and call.
Awaken in us a desire to follow in his footsteps, to go forth from our own land and to receive his promise.
Help us to be touched by his love, that we may touch him in faith.
Help us to entrust ourselves fully to him and to believe in his love, especially at times of trial, beneath the shadow of the cross, when our faith is called to mature.
Sow in our faith the joy of the Risen One.
Remind us that those who believe are never alone.
Teach us to see all things with the eyes of Jesus, that he may be light for our path. And may this light of faith always increase in us, until the dawn of that undying day which is Christ himself, your Son, our Lord!”
Amen.
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