Faith is a word that many people use without much thought given to what it really means. For many, it is more of a concept or an idea, and as such, it has a certain invisibility about it. As a result, to have faith is then a bit like having some form of ‘force-field’ where one has a spiritual Wi-Fi connection with God. The more one has faith, the more bars one has on one’s spiritual Wi-Fi connection display.
Does faith have an external display in life though? Is faith something that has a visibility on the outside of one’s heart and soul? Some would say that a person who physically shows up in a place of worship and performs the requisite drills of gestures and rote phrases like “Amen” and “And with your spirit” is displaying faith on some level. In some ways, it isn’t completely wrong to say that these can be evidence that someone has faith, but everyone knows that just mimicking gestures and mouthing phrases that one can repeat without much effort may just be a revelation that one is good at doing those two things well – mimicking and mouthing phrases. When I look out at my congregation at Mass in front of me, and I see before me a few hundred people who seem to “know the drill” without question, I do see a public manifestation of some incipient faith through their physical bodily motions and response to prayers. But in truth, just looking at this alone tells nothing much about the individual, partly because these things require very little from the individual. That is because actions can be done or performed perfunctorily or passively, where one’s heart can be absent from the motions themselves.
Of course, it isn’t my place or duty to make any judgments on what is going on in the peoples’ hearts and minds. God only knows the million and one things that can be assuaging each individual’s conscience at any given time, whether it is during Mass or outside of it. Faith is definitely more than what one sees on the outside. Yet, I believe that each person can and should be clear that there is a certain gauge which one ought to check in regularly to see how healthy or unhealthy one’s faith life is. We do this (or at least should be doing this) with our physical health by getting our blood pressure, sugar levels and even cancer-markers tested. Every Christian has a similar obligation to do this for our spiritual health. But what is the marker? What is the standard to meet?
It came to me while I was meditating on the first reading from this Sunday’s Mass readings (2ndSunday of Lent) where in the first reading from the book of Genesis, we see how Abram displayed his faith so clearly. He is called the “Father of faith”, and for good reason. He put aside his fear, his uncertainty, and his own self, to allow God to have his way with him and his life.
Ultimately, that is what the contour of our faith life needs to display as well. I often say that we begin to live the high bar of the Christian life when we live with the axiom that ‘our life is not about us’.
I wonder whether the people who hear me saying this are hearing this – put yourself and your dreams and your ideals down, and don’t have any aims in life, and just sit in the corner and just wait for God to reveal in some big and dramatic way what direction your life should take. I am not saying this at all. We are not lemmings who have no will of our own and just follow what is leading in front of us. To be sure, very very few people in life have that kind of supernatural revelation of God’s plan for them in the specific way that Abram had. Scripture scholars would not be in total agreement with how God’s plan was revealed to Abram, because it isn’t even clear whether it was an inner locution, or some external theophany that was given to Abram. But what is crystal clear is that Abram put aside all that gave him security, all that gave him comfort, and all that gave him some sense of familiarity, just so that he could be obedient to the deepest stirrings of his heart.
Living a life of faith has a lot to do with living a life of grace. And what does a life of grace look like? It is when one has allowed very little room for sin to grow and sit stubbornly in one’s heart. After all, sin is not just doing bad things, but wanting to do what we want, when we want, especially when we know that it ultimately hurts and injures our relationship with God and with our fellow man and woman. Sin happens when we only listen to the wants and needs of our ego.
To live a life of faith necessarily means that even though my choice for sin looks attractive, comfortable, desirable and enticing, I want to make a choice against it, mainly because I believe that my life will be one a much more joyful plane when I say no to those temptations, delightful though they may be. I have an ultimate delight in my God that trumps many times over the delight that sin may give me, and I know this to be a fact because each time I say yes to sin, I always end up knowing that I made a very stupid, selfish and self-centered choice. Abram must have intuited all this (probably not in such a graphic way), and it earned him the accolade of being the father of faith.
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