#god question

How do I know if my faith is enough?

One afternoon, on the way home from our two-day retreat, I felt the lightest and the happiest even though I have spent the previous day crying and reflecting on my past actions. But just before the day ended, I was immediately tested. What I thought was the beginning of a life full of understanding became the total opposite. I began to pray, to converse to God. I thought the best way to get God’s attention was to rant about how frustrated I was with everything that was happening. The act of praying dared me to ask again; is the ‘level’ of my faith enough to understand everything? Do I just simply believe that things are going to get better because He is there? Do I just talk and wait for what is next? Questions came in like a domino. This act of questioning even questions me why I question Him. Just like what Karl Rahner said, ‘the human person is always questing… always asking more questions.’ This is where the work of theology comes in. What is theology, by the way? It is the guide to knowing who God is. To theologize – to engage in reasoning – involves the use of one’s faith. Theology begins with ‘a faith that is imperfect, even wounded.’

Faith, our belief, is said to be a gift only when it is not demanded nor taken. It is an offer wherein it is up to the receiver to accept it. It begins with acknowledging God’s revelation. The revelation comes in a way where it challenges us to accept situations against our will. I can recall one afternoon in the month of May, I collapsed on the floor – crying. I was heartbroken by the fact that the people I still wanted to be a part of my life were now just a part of my history. I tried to chase them in the hopes of retrieving the relationships that once existed. I had my whys – why this, why now (at the height of this pandemic), and why me. As I continuously conversed with God, it was as if I was lowering my guard down. I was surrendering to God’s objectivity. I heard no voice, but I was surrounded by a calming silence. Little did I know, this struggle was His invitation for me to approach Him.

My relationship with God began. Just like any relationship, it begins with the desire to know the other person. It involves being genuine to establish trust. Getting to know God began through Bible reading, prayer, and written reflections. It was where I first encountered St. Thomas Aquinas’ credo ut intelligam, “I believe in order that I may understand”. We are commonly grounded with the idea that being logical constantly needs evidence, that something must be understood first before we believe. For example, we understand how atoms work before we believe in such theories. It is difficult for us to believe in situations when they do not unfold right before our eyes.

On the contrary, I believe that no one can ever live without faith. The simple act of sitting on a chair and believing that it will support your weight is already an act of faith. It is just that, without having God as the center of our faith, we do not know where we are headed to – what the purpose of our drive to live is. In faith, our evidence rests on the Scriptures written. Confidence is passed onto us through this. I may have not seen God physically but believing in the Scriptures allows me to see Him through the people I encounter and the situations that I face. This we can say as the intellectual dimension of faith, ‘accepting the truth of an event on the testimony of God’.

Throughout my relationship with God, situations became understandable. After several weeks of making a routine of making time for worship, there exists this unexplainable optimism regardless of undesirable situations arising. It was as if I was looking forward to the good in the coming days. This is could be the affective dimension of faith, trusting that “God is at our side as we walk through ‘the valley of death’”. But overemphasizing this could result in fideism wherein we just simply believe without bothering to ask why such things to happen. I have noticed that my relationship with God progressed. Though I did not ‘feel’ an answer, but I became positive over things.

Surprisingly, I felt like an answer took too long to happen that I started to doubt. I find it ironic that I saw my relationship with God as something that was growing and genuine, yet I still had the gut to have doubts about Him after all. John Davies says that “the enemy of faith is not doubt but the suppression of doubt”. Doubt signals the presence of fear – it happens because we believe in things then suddenly, what we were looking forward to does not happen.

This associates to Gerald O’ Collins’ statement that reason ‘checks, scrutinizes, and reflects on the content of faith and one’s practice of it’. Faith does not just merely accept things the way they are but confronts it. We question the kind of faith we practice and the purpose of our existence in the presence of uncertainties. By confronting doubt, we recognize it instead of stopping it.

We relate this to Socrates’ famous “an unexamined life is not worth living.” I imagine this scenario in a classroom where the teacher discusses a lesson and asks, “Do you guys have a question?” When the student asks, it cues the desire to learn and clarify such teachings, the same goes to faith. And in these questions, we must dive in them.