Question 7.115

7.115 How would you define the word “faith”?

ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH

Faith is like the response of an engaged couple. By their “yes”, which will involve their whole lives, two beings dedicate their love. This loving sentiment is based on a mutual faith that gives credit to the other and counts on his fidelity in the future. Thus the two become one flesh. In their love, each one humbles himself before the other, flourishes and grows in the other. “Love has grown in me”, Saint [Thérèse of Lisieux used to say timidly and vigorously. In faith and love, God grows in me and lifts me up to him. But faith is also a gift from God, because man always responds freely to the call of heaven. This is not about some theoretical response, but about a personal experience of God, as he is.

In responding to God, we base our life on him, and the Father places his hope in us. God always wants to conform man to his image and likeness. It is important to understand that faith is a covenant of love that causes us to become one and the same being with the beloved person.

In his book The Sign of Jonas,¹ Thomas Merton wondered whether it was possible to declare that “by Love, the soul receives the very ‘form’ of God.” In the language of Saint Bernard, this form, which we could associate with a divine likeness, is the identity for which we are created. And so we can say: “Caritas haec visio, haec similitudo est” (Charity is this vision, this sameness). Through love we have a direct resemblance to God, and through mystical love, we “see” him here below, in the sense that we already have the experience of God as he is in himself.

Faith is the most beautiful experience of God. One extraordinary example of this is given by Abraham. After hearing a call, he set out with confidence. We are the children of Abraham, our father in faith, and we belong to the lines of the spiritual descendants of the people of the Exodus, traveling through the desert. In the same way, Christians are also the children of Jesus’ disciples, those who followed him. Thus, faith can be defined as a spiritual walk that is led and guided solely by God’s voice. To put it differently, I would say that faith is adherence to a word that is known to come from a place farther on and higher than me. The whole Bible ceaselessly unfolds this providential gift.

Faith is also an act that gradually and definitively transforms us. Since Abraham had to agree to sacrifice his son Isaac, the son of the promise, faith is an act that makes us radically different. After the trial of the sacrifice of his son, neither Abraham nor Isaac was the same; Isaac was no longer the same son for Abraham. He had been given and commended to God; he became the sign of another filiation. Similarly, Abraham no longer lived merely as the man who had received a gift from God: the gift of his son Isaac. Now he was the one who had agreed to be dispossessed of this gift and to recover it as a spiritual heritage.

In fact, faith is always a Paschal journey in search of the Father’s will, in line with Abraham’s fidelity and obedience even to the altar on which he was to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Saint Paul defines faith as obedience to the Father (Rom 1:5; 16:25). Yet we must understand that our obedience can lead to the mountain of sacrifice. Thus, the journey of faith is the journey of man’s consent to God’s will. The Father’s commandments are always a charter for life that requires our loving consent. Faith consists of willing what God wills, loving what God loves, even if that leads us to the Cross.

We place our faith in Jesus Christ. We rely on him, because he is “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb 12:2). Through him, we say “Amen” to God for his glory (2 Cor 1:20). The word amen, in Hebrew, refers to something firm and worthy of confidence. This word, therefore, expresses the response of man’s fidelity to God’s fidelity in Jesus Christ. We can rely on God as though on a rock, with the conviction and assurance that, even though it is situated on the edge of an abyss, it will not crumble. In a relationship of faith, God is my stronghold, my fortress, and my rock.

Faith does not presuppose any guarantees. The believer walks in the dark, like a pilgrim seeking the light. What he knows he knows only in the half-light of evening, walking with the help of a cognitio vespertina and not yet of a cognitio matutina, a knowledge of clear vision, according to the beautiful terminology of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas.

If I may refer to a very suggestive medieval etymology, I cannot forget that the verb to believe, credere, supposedly meant also cor-dare, “to give one’s heart” and to place it unconditionally into the hands of an Other.

The man who believes agrees, like Abraham, to become the prisoner of the invisible God; he agrees to let the Father possess him in obedient listening, docility of heart, and the lights of his intellect. His walk toward God is consent and abandonment, without expecting to benefit from reassuring guarantees. Saint Paul gave us this magnificent program: “I press on to make [the resurrection from the dead] my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil 3:12).

In April 2014, Pope Francis recalled in a homily that he gave at Saint Martha’s that “Christianity is not a philosophical doctrine, it is not a program of life that enables one to be well formed and to make peace. These are its consequences. The Cross is the mystery of the love of God who humbles himself. There is no Christianity without the Cross. There is no way for us to abandon sin unaided. Christ humbles himself to save us. And so just as in the desert sin was lifted up, here God made man was lifted up for us. And all of our sins were there. One cannot understand Christianity without understanding this profound humiliation of the Son of God, who humbled himself and made himself a servant unto death on the Cross. To serve.” The Holy Father added: “The heart of God’s salvation is his Son, who took upon himself our sins, our pride, our self-reliance, our vanity, our desire to be like God. A Christian who is not able to glory in Christ Crucified has not understood what it means to be Christian. Our wounds, those that sin leaves in us, are healed only through the Lord’s wounds, through the wounds of God made man who humbled himself, who emptied himself.”

I like this reflection by the pope very much, because it shows that faith is a commitment of our entire being. Faith taken to its ultimate degree is an absolute act of dispossession in God. On this earth, I think that the Carthusian monks, the sons of Saint Bruno, who place all their hope in God, are one of the finest examples of lives given entirely to God. In their hermitages, nothing matters anymore except divine hope.