Parish Missions

Faith: Profession vs Practice

There are probably as many interpretations of the word faith as there are people on the planet. Some may consider it a synonym for trust or confidence. We all make a profession of faith at our Sunday liturgy, but I would suggest that most people in the pew have only a vague idea of what some of those articles of faith mean. I also doubt that saying “I” believe instead of “we” believe will do anything to change that. Peter says he believes, but his actions show that he can’t follow through. Jesus points out his lack of faith, his inability to put his profession into practice.

When I was in my first year of theology, the professor of our “Basics of Christian Belief” course asked us to write a paper on the possible meanings of the word “faith.” Having just come off twenty-four years of teaching high school composition, including creative writing, I took a page out of my own lesson plans and wrote a dialog between a searcher (me) and a number of people to whom I asked the question, “What is the meaning of the word faith in your life?” I chose several friends of mine for the project, including both devout and former Catholics, an agnostic, an atheist, a Jew, a gay man, and a fairly conservative non-Catholic Christian.

The results floored me, but not Fr. Marty Smith, the theology professor. There was “method in his madness in making this assignment to first year theologians! He was not surprised that the ones who came closest to what might be considered a mature perception of faith were not the devout Catholic or even the conservative Christian. Their definition of faith revolved around the concept of trust in God’s presence in their lives. Even when I pursued examples from their lived experience, their further explanations were all about what God was doing or had done, or would do for them, rather than what was expected of them as witness to their faith

In fact, the atheist and the agnostic (the latter a former Catholic) came fairly close to the meaning of faith being “belief put fearlessly into practice,” clearly stating that how they lived their lives was the measure of whatever their belief might be. My gay friend, was somewhere in the middle, saying that trust in God’s love for him allowed him to live more selflessly. The most convoluted explanation of faith came from the former Catholic, whose explanation was so all over the place that he finally admitted he had no idea of what faith really meant! My paper concluded that faith, although a clearly private matter in the context of my mini-survey, was more profession than practice for those who considered themselves “faithful.”

A 2010 study conducted last year by the Pew Research Center came to a somewhat similar conclusion regarding religious knowledge:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the

highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge,

out performing evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants

and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history

and leading figures of major world religions.

The Scriptures today seek to challenge us to look more closely at how our beliefs are acted upon. The example of Peter shows the risks in a faith that fails to go beyond words to a total letting-go of self. Peter’s faith is weak not because he really didn’t believe in Jesus, but rather because he refused to place himself totally at the disposal of that faith. So often faith professed has very little to do with the way a life is lived. We’re pro-life for sure, but we are also reluctant to come to the rescue of someone whose quality of life is in shambles. We are invited to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, yet we so easily demonize those different from us. Like Peter, we will sink, if we are not willing to allow our faith to be a belief put fearlessly into practice.

In the same way we find Elijah comes to recognize that God will be found not in the spectacular, but in the simple, ordinariness of our daily lives. The presence of God is in the pain of a stranger, the hopelessness of the poor, the tension and struggle in our own relationships. Our belief in God should be witnessed by our acknowledgement of our God’s presence in the messiness of the human condition. It may be comforting to see our God as an “awesome God,” but the consistent and challenging message of Sacred Scripture is that our God “has pitched his tent among us.” That is, after all, the essence of what we know as the Incarnation. That’s also an article of our faith.

We come to the Sunday Eucharistic celebration to renew our faith in the presence of our God in our daily lives and the challenge to live out that faith, beginning with our own personal relationships and expanding as the very compassion of Christ to all those who are in need. We are again nourished by the Word and strengthened by the Sacrament to embrace our faith, not simply as professed, but as belief put fearlessly into practice.