Faith
is born of a call from God. No one can take the credit for personal faith
and conversion. It was not Abraham who
took the initiative to leave or to invent a new way to serve God. Neither did God invite him with a proposal
that he could contest with his own opinion.
God called him in the imperative and this is the same way that the glorious
prophets and saints were called.
It is in this way that God freed us. As a consequence of sin, all humans are born
and live in the foreign land of sin. The
fullness of our personal reality is not grounded in God for as long as we are
not in communion with Him. Our religions
and our ideologies as products of our culture do not permit us to transcend the
limits of a world that we make by and for ourselves according to the measure of
our own resources. In order for us to take full conscience of our
call, it is necessary for God to call us and that we accept the invitation to escape
the fatal circle.
Faith
places us in the service of God’s will which is to save humanity. It
is possible that for a moment God attracts us with a personal favor, but then he
inserts us into His specific projects to the end of saving the world. In order to follow Christ and be a part of His
Chosen People, it is necessary to believe in the promises that God made to His
people. God destined us to be the yeast
and the light of the world.
Faith
requires a breaking away. It obliges us to look forward without yearning for the
warmth and comfort of the womb. Humans
grow by overcoming “crisis” after “crisis” in life. They leave their family, go to work, get
married… Faith gives us the strength to confront these ruptures with optimism
and brings us to the point where we can confront more painful ones. This process allows us to enter more deeply
into the service of God. Faith is the
greatest medium through which humans grow into maturity.
The
Faith of Abraham teaches us the difference
between earthly human who construct their lives according to the standards of human
wisdom and believe that they know where they are going, and the person of faith
who seeks the signs of god in order to see where God wills the path forward to
be. For an entire life, the person of
faith is a wanderer, a pilgrim seeking
higher righteousness, purer justice and greater perfection than that which is
the product of purely human confection.
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