Brethren, may the Peace of Christ that surpasses every understanding be always with you and all His Good and Blessings and the happiness that spring from them eternally.
Faith as being in love
Some time back, a friend asked me how did it feel like to believe in God. The friend – a young lady who had suffered much in life and who counted herself as a unbeliever – asked it of me, earnestly.
I was stumped.
Much later I answered her that believing in God is a lot like being in love: one always thinks of the Beloved, His reality fills one’s senses, aspirations, and hope, and one’s soul can’t wait to unite herself in love with Him who Himself is Love. My answer was a shot in the dark, coming well after we had stopped talking to each other – she also had a thin skin for political discussion or probing questions about her ultimate values. No matter.
If you have been in love – and I have been with my wife for 30 years now – then you will understand the simile. Faith is not a mere intellectual assent to articles of belief proposed by the Church, it is that, but it is much more. The dogmas of the Church are lamps lighting the way, means to an end and not ends in themselves. The end, is God himself, his Person, and the communion of the creature with His all-transforming love.
If you have never been in love,really in love and not merely infatuated or emotionally co-dependent, then you will not know what I mean. Perhaps by loving another, really loving someone outside yourself, your heart will crack open enough to love God, for to believe in Him is to love Him.
Faith as listening to a symphony
One of the dictionary definitions of symphony is “Harmony, especially of sound or color.” Sometimes the harmony of sound and light may be effected, as in the Disney movie Fantasia. The essence of a symphony is the harmony of tempo and music, the blending of the instruments, the artistry of the players, the discipline of the conductor, and the passions of the composer. The educated ear detects the harmonious layering of sound but only the heart of the hearer is able to understand the heart of the composer. If we ignore one’s heart – one’s soul, really – we lost a full dimension of music, perhaps the dimension that matters most.
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whose The Three Ages of the Interior Life (2 Volume Set)
Infused faith is like a faculty of supernatural audition, like a higher musical sense, which permits us to hear the spiritual harmonies of the kingdom of heaven, to hear, in a way, the voice of God through the prophets and His Son before we are admitted to see Him face to face. Between the unbeliever, who studies the Gospel, and the believer, there is a difference similar to that which exists between two persons who are listening to a Beethoven symphony, one of whom has a musical ear and the other has not. Both hear all the notes of the symphony, but one alone grasps its meaning and its soul. Similarly, only the believer adheres supernaturally to the Gospel as to the supernatural word of God; and he adheres to it even though untutored, while the learned man with all his means of criticism cannot, without infused faith, adhere to it in this manner. "He that believeth in the Son of God, hath the testimony of God in himself."
It follows too that the unbeliever, particularly the militant one, the one who seeks increasing restrictions upon the freedom of expression and the open participation of Christian believers in the public arena, that unbeliever is tone deaf. In fact, in his darkness, the unbelievers rejoices at the fact of being tone deaf and in his delusion, he wants everyone around him to be tone deaf too. But I digress.
Of course, there are people in darkness out there who can appreciate a good symphony. Legends recount how Nero fiddled while watching Rome burn, and how, upon his death, he lamented how the world had lost a great poet. Hitler liked Wagner and if I recall correctly, racist and convicted criminal Matthew F. Hale was an accomplished musician. It stands to reason that passion for music or poetry alone does not prepare a person to believe in God. That’s because to listen to God’s symphony one has to be able to love with an open heart, holding nothing back, which takes us back to the first comparison: believing in God in a manner of speaking, is being in love with God.
Bottom line: if you are, or ever been, in love that includes total surrender of self for the good of another, you have a good inkling of what believing or “having faith” is all about. If you can appreciate a symphony with more than your physical senses, but with your soul also, that would be another fair comparison. If you can do both, you are well on your way to faith. If you can do neither, you better go home and reexamine your life.