FAITH, NOT FOR JUST A YEAR, BUT FOR A LIFETIME

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 them.   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.  Godz 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.