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I wrote a few years ago [Seeing with the Eyes of Faith] about how faith is not a blind leap in the hope that there might be something on the other side to catch us. Instead, it is an act of seeing and realizing about another, and turning towards that other. Faith in God is exactly this: an encounter with God, where we learn about him who he is, and what he would be for us, if we allow him. Only then can we decide to turn towards him, to live a life built around him.
Yet living such a life is not always so easy. One of the most difficult things about it is that while we glimpse the truth around which we are building our life, we do not see that truth quite so constantly and clearly that we can always be fully reassured. The world we live in is broken, and so are we. One of the places we are broken is in our lack of ability to see all of what is actually there, all of the time.
This is particularly true in the case of God: he sometimes seems obscure, even invisible. When he is visible, he is not always obvious. When we have an experience of God, when we are perceiving his presence, we are confident, but then afterwards, when we are not experiencing God in the way that we did before, we start to wonder if what we experienced was actually real, or if we somehow imagined or misremembered it. Sometimes we even gaslight ourselves, or others gaslight us, causing us to question things that have already been clearly established. This makes it challenging to keep turning toward God, to live a life that incorporates God into who we are, because our seeing is inconstant and incomplete. If it means that we start to reject things we know (or ought to know) to be true, our life becomes confused: we do not know who we are anymore, or how we should relate to God, whose presence or love we question simply because he is not demonstrating it to us right now in an undeniable way. We become like insecure children, seeking constant reassurance, and panicking if it does not come quickly enough.
One way to overcome this is to be deliberate and structural about what we know to be true, so that when we doubt or even gaslight ourselves, we have structure in our lives that keeps reminding us of what is real. This is the wisdom behind the Church’s insistence on weekly Mass and daily prayer: it helps keeps us steady, when our inconstancy and insecurity would otherwise cause us to falter.
Another challenge is our set of wants and fears. These can be very powerful: our wants can be so strong that they can lead us to believe things because we want them to be true, rather than because we know they are true. This is called wishful thinking, or (when we ignore facts we don’t like) confirmation bias. Fears can have a similar effect: anxiety-driven beliefs are things that we think are true because we are afraid they might be, such as a child believing there are monsters under the bed at night. An extreme example is paranoia, where one’s view of reality is formed by one’s fears. The fact is, the truth is the truth, regardless of our wishes or our fears. We have to carefully separate in our mind the things we want, or the things we fear, from the things that actually are. Sometimes the things we want or the things we fear are true, sometimes they are not. If they are true, what makes them true is not our wanting or our fear, it is the facts. And if they are not true, they are not real, no matter how realistic our wish-driven or fear-driven imagination makes them seem.
When we discover God, and we come to believe in him and structure our life around him, we are not suddenly freed from our wants and our fears. We still have to face them. This means we need to carefully distinguish what we want, and what we fear, from what is or isn’t real. We may have many things we want God to be, or do, and we may have many things we fear about who God is and what he might do (or not do). At the times when God seems very clear to us, our wants and our fears may be manageable: we are more easily able to distinguish who God is from what we might want or fear about him. But when he is less visible and obvious, then our wants and fears start to clamor, and we risk mixing up what we want, or what we fear, for who God is.
The remedy for this is the same as for our imperfect vision: deliberate and regular exposure to what is real. We need structure, to keep us steady and to help us overcome our wants and fears when they threaten to distort our recognition of what is real. But structure by itself is not enough: we also need guidance. This is where the Church comes in. In the Church, there are other people who do not necessarily have the same wants and fears as we do, and even if they do, they may not be overwhelmed by them at the same time as we might be overwhelmed by ours. Thus they can help us recognize what is true by helping us distinguish what is real from what is coming from us, from our own minds. But there is more than this. Jesus didn’t found the Church only so that we could have companionship, he gave to the Church the Holy Spirit, to guide it:
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. [John 16:13]
For this reason, we can rely on the Church itself, and what it teaches, to help us distinguish the truth from our own wants and fears. The Church has been entrusted by Jesus with the big picture, a bigger picture than we are able to see for ourselves. Whether or not we like the Church’s particular decisions or statements, or whether we like or dislike the pope or the bishops, the fact is that what the Church teaches is the truth, and we can and should rely on it. Despite the presence of human beings in the Church, with their flaws and foibles, the Church has been founded by Jesus and is preserved and guided by the Holy Spirit. The Church is a gift to us from God to help us keep properly in mind what is true. This helps us live a life structured around God, who is real and true. Let us accept this gift to help us keep our faith steady and constant, as we turn towards God, to live lives built around him.
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