By Randall Smith
Sometimes I hear people say things like: “I want to believe, but I just can’t,” or “I’d like to believe, but the truth is I don’t.” I don’t mean to criticize those people. I suppose their hesitation about “faith” comes from a sincere desire to be honest with themselves, like someone admitting: “I wish I were a calm and even-tempered person, but I simply am not.”
That’s why, while I respect their good intentions, I’d like to ask that person: “What do you think faith is?” “How do you think it feels to have faith?” I sometimes fear that people think “having faith” is the same as “having certainty,” or that “having faith” is a feeling one experiences when one is sure of something. What if it isn’t? What if it’s something else? What if it’s like love: not so much a feeling, but a way of living?
Before exploring the question of faith, we should clarify another point. People don’t simply “have faith”; they have faith in something. In God. In God’s love for us. In the fact that God’s love for us is expressed and embodied in Christ. Therefore, we wouldn’t only be inquiring about faith—that’s too vague. We would start by asking what that person believes or does not believe.
So, for example, we might ask: Does it seem reasonable to you that the entire universe, with all its beauty and order, and especially with human beings capable of knowing, loving, and sacrificing for one another, arose from nothing, for nothing, and for no purpose? Hypothetically it’s possible, but is that what you believe? Some people do. Do you?
Are you convinced that life—all life—and all existence are essentially meaningless? Because if you’re not convinced of that, then it’s possible that life does have meaning. And, in fact, don’t you already live that way? Haven’t you shown by the way you live—caring for others, trying to do good instead of acting selfishly, appreciating beauty and trying to understand more deeply what surrounds you—that you actually believe in something?
If we look at how you actually live, wouldn’t we have to conclude that you truly believe that living this way has meaning and is not something absurd? You act as if selfless care for others has value, as if acting with love and concern for your neighbor is good. You have no scientific proof that this kind of life is intrinsically valuable and good. Yet you live as if it were. That is a form of faith.
So, what if I told someone who claims they wish they had faith but can’t: “But wait, you actually do have faith; you just haven’t realized it or reflected on it”? That assumption you bring to your view of the world and to your way of living when you assume that courage, kindness, generosity, and care are better than cowardice, cruelty, arrogance, and selfishness is part of what Christians call “faith.”
There is no scientific proof that this life is better. In fact, there are plenty of reasons to suppose that being selfish makes more sense than being generous. Don’t you sometimes say to yourself: “I must be crazy to live this way, giving myself selflessly to others instead of hoarding everything I can for myself”?
So, what keeps bringing you back to self-giving, care, and generosity? Is it something you’ve noticed in your own experience? Is it something you simply sense as true? That intuition that something you can’t touch, measure, or prove scientifically is, in fact, true—truth of the kind you’d be willing to stake your entire life on, even if you don’t always have absolute certainty—is what Christians call “faith.”
There’s no need to get tangled up in the word. Call it whatever you want. But just so you know: you have faith. You simply haven’t examined it.
Therefore, if you realized that you actually believe life has intrinsic meaning—not only yours, but that of all creatures—you could start asking yourself other questions, such as: How is this possible? How could a meaningless universe contain love and purpose? Could it be that this meaning present in all beings is a gift from a loving Creator? Where else could we have gotten it?
People often imagine that one first says: “God exists,” and then concludes: “Well, I suppose I should be moral.” But what if it were the other way around? What if people discovered that the only life worth living is a moral life of love, care, and concern for one’s neighbor, and only then said to themselves: “I suppose there must be a God who made all this possible”?
Do you want to live a life of selfless love? Excellent. Do it. That kind of life requires a particular kind of faith. If you live it, you have it. Christians have an explanation for why that way of living makes sense: it involves a loving God who loves us so much that He was willing to assume our humanity and die for us. In this, He revealed Himself as a gift of selfless love.
But don’t confuse the fact of not fully “understanding” the explanation of why that life of love makes sense with a lack of faith. When you despair of becoming the person you know you want to be, that is a lack of faith. When you fail but keep trying—when you still hold for yourself the ideal of the good—then you still have faith. Stop worrying about whether you have it or not, and just live it.
About the author
Randall Smith Randall Smith holds the J. Michael Miller Chair in Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. His books include Bonaventure’s Journey of the Soul into God: Context and Commentary, From Here to Eternity: Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Scholastic Culture of Medieval Paris: Preaching, Prologues, and Biblical Commentary and Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide. His forthcoming book, Mapping Bonaventure’s Itinerarium: Context and Commentary, will be published by Emmaus Press this summer. His articles can be found here: http://t4.stthom.edu/users/smith/portfolio/