Faith the Center of All Things

Commentary from Magnificat: I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners. (Lk 5:32) The most difficult part of ongoing conversion is admitting that we really are sinners and allowing God to see and forgive us as we are, with all our faults unmended and all our flaws showing, especially the ones over which we seem to have no control.

Meditation of the Day

Faith the Center of All Things

I believe it is important to acquire a fresh awareness of the fact that faith is the center of all things – “ Fides tua te salvum fecit,” the Lord said over and over again to those he healed. It was not the physical touch, it was not the external gesture that was operative, but the fact that those sick people believed. And we too can only serve the Lord energetically if our faith thrives and is present in abundance.

In this context, I want to emphasize two crucial points.

First, faith is above all faith in God. In Christianity it is not a matter of an enormous bundle of different things; all that the Creed says and the development of faith has achieved exists only to make our perception of the Face of God clearer. He exists and he is alive; we believe in him; we live before him, in his sight, in being with him and from him. And in Jesus Christ, he is, as it were, with us bodily.

To my mind, this centrality of God must appear in a completely new light in our thoughts and actions.

Futhermore, this is what enlivens activities which, on the contrary, can easily lapse into activism and become empty.

This is the first point I want to stress: faith actually, looks to God with determination and thus impels us to turn to look to God and set out toward him.

The other thing concerns the fact that we ourselves cannot invent faith, composing it with “sustainable” pieces, but we believe together with the Church. We cannot understand all that the Church teaches, nor must all of it be present in every life.

Yet it is important that we are co-believers in the great “I” of the Church, in her living “We,” and therefore by find ourselves in the great community of faith, in that great subject in which the “You” of God and the “I” of man truly touch each other; in which the past of the words of Scripture becomes the present, times flow into one another, the past is present and, opening itself to the future, all into time the brightness of eternity, of the Eternal One.

This complete form of faith, expressed in the Creed, a faith in and with the Church as a living subject in which the Lord works: it is this form of faith that we must seek to put truly at the heart of our endeavor.

Pope Benedict XVI was elected to the See of Saint Peter in 2005.

tip of the hat to Doctors of the Catholic Church and to Magnificat.