How to Grow Faith
Even with 20 years of formal Catholic education, I’ve struggled with faith most of my adult life. Does God exist? Was Jesus really God? Am I fooling myself about God, Jesus, life after death?
Accepting Uncertainty
Secondly, faith means accepting uncertainty, which doesn’t seem a problem in other aspects of our lives. Uncertainty is as pervasive as air. People we were certain were loyal friends turn out not to be. Before Einstein, Newton’s physics were certain. Almost daily revelations show we can never be certain about the effectiveness and safety of medications.
So if we have some degree of faith – if only the size of a mustard seed, which is no larger than the period at the end of the next sentence – how do we keep it and grow it? The point of Jesus’ analogy, I believe, is that even a minimal amount of faith is enough to believe that “anything is possible.”
Prayer, it seems to me, is the best start. If we believe in God, even with doubt, we should ask him/her to help us believe. And prayer, wrote the great mystic Teresa of Avila, “is nothing but friendly intercourse, and frequent converse, with him who we know loves us.”
Those in the Judeo-Christian tradition should read the Bible. Christians could start with something easy, like the Acts of the Apostles and graduate to the gospels and the letters of Paul. In the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, at least the early chapters, is also relatively easy to read.
Research has shown that many Christians, at least, depend on the knowledge of their faith they learned in elementary school. The rest of their knowledge may have grown exponentially but their faith is stuck in the rudiments, with a child’s understanding in an age when an adult’s understanding is needed like never before.
That’s not to say that believers need a formal education. Neither the prophets nor Jesus mentioned having an academic degree, but in an age when knowledge in every other aspect of our lives is exploding, having a child’s grasp of our faith is an obstacle, for us and those with whom we come into contact.
Insight
Fr. Herbert McCabe, an English theologian and philosopher who died in 2001, has some insight on the subject of faith.
“Faith, in fact, is about what we call God. Faith is the inkling that we are meant to be divine, that our journey will go beyond any horizon at all into the limitlessness of the Godhead. Faith is not our power to set out on this journey into the future. It is our future laying hold on us. …Faith is not something we possess. It is something by which we are possessed.”
