Suffering With Joy

True Faith vs. Intellectual Pride

August 9, 2010

In my post Seeking God’s Will I introduced readers to my dear friend Father Philip Schuster, OSB (RIP). I am reading his book again as part of my ongoing journey of suffering with joy.  His simplicity of heart was very inspiring and it opened my eyes to having greater trust in God. We will never achieve the holiness God desires for us if we don’t learn this lesson because our intellectual pride will always block our surrender to Him. To the extent we refuse to surrender we limit our ability to love.

Three Children of Fatima

Saints are not made overnight.  Achieving great charity, and that is the meaning of being a saint,  is done minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day with much toe-stubbing, ankle-twisting and knee-skinning along the way.  The first step seems to me to empty ourselves of our intellectual pride - and sometimes that’s like bailing out a boat with a leaky bucket – so that we follow the exhortation of Jesus: Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a child, shall not enter into it. (Lk. 18: 17).  Faith is to be received Jesus tells us, simply, as a child believes his parents, with open-hearted trust in God and an emptying of self.  If we do not become child-like, we make no room in our hearts for faith.

Here is that beautiful, child-like simplicity from Father Philip:

Human reason or intellect enters into faith and has a very important place.  But in faith, reason isn’t there to question what God has said or to determine what is true.  For by faith we already know what is true.  God has told us.  Reason is there to study the meaning of it all, to see the beauty and goodness of it all, to make the truth my own, to respond to it and live it. But not to question it!  For we know it is true, once God has revealed it.

As soon as you question what God has said, you indicate little faith or no faith at all. Consider what happened to Zechariah (see Luke 1:20).  Faith demands that I keep an open mind to what God has to say, and that when I believe, I believe simply because God has spoken…

It just may be true that saying we believe is not necessarily proof of real faith.  Perhaps we often accept some truth or some moral law, not because we are convinced that God has taught it, but because it seems right to us and fits our desires at present. Proof of this, at least proof enough for us to take warning, comes from the fact that if something taught by the Church today doesn’t seem reasonable to us, we hesitate or even refuse to accept it.  Which more or less proves that we are guided all along by our own reasoning power and not by faith.  For again, faith is essentially a simple accepting because God has spoken.

Father Philip cuts to the heart of the matter.  When I think of the times I doubted in the past, it was because I allowed the devil to confuse me.  He only does this when our willfulness rules us and we press forward into sin because we want to indulge.  I can truthfully say that any time I asked God for a deeper understanding of a truth of the Faith, He always answered me. Sometimes He made me wait awhile.  Sometimes He showed me right away.  But He never denied me the grace to see the beauty, goodness, and harmony of it all, nor the grace as Father Philip writes, “to respond to it and live it.”

I’ll be back with more from Father Philip soon.

Tags: joy, suffering, trust in God