Faith

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In the past week of September 2015, Pope Francis visited the United States for the first time, in his visit to the U.S. many have gather to get a quick glimpse of the Holy Father as the light of the poor, sick, needy, and as a sign of Gods’ faith in todays world. Irene Alexander who wrote about Popes Francis’s Lumen Fidei and Contemporary Errors on the Nature of Divine Faith, starts with the following quote, “Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love … transformed by this love, we gain fresh vision, new eyes to see” (Alexander 11). Pope Francis is a living proof of what actions with faith can influence others to do. The Pope is the light that many are trying to follow and emulate. During his visit to ground zero in New York, Pope Francis along with other religion leaders, prayed together for peace and the well being all human kind. According to Irene Alexander, Pope Francis in his Lumen Fidei talks about:

“Faith is a light, initiating the believer into communion with God, and therefore into the deepest and most profound truths of human existence. Yet unlike the blind man of Luke’s Gospel, who knows he is blind, knows that he wants to see, and knows from whom he can receive his sight, crying out to him, Pope Francis’s encyclical is directed towards a different kind of blindness, the blindness of contemporary man who has not yet realized that he is blind. This blindness of soul, as the ancient philosophers understood, is a more debilitating kind of blindness” (11).

Finally, faith is a gift from God that is freely given to those whom thirst that intimate relationship with God. Who ever believes in God has to take a positive step and be able to abandoned oneself to God and also leaving room for God. According to Rene A. Lopez “Viewing faith as a gift is used to judge whether a person is a genuine believer or merely professing to be saved. That is, if God endows a person with faith to believe, it logically follows that God will also bestow and guarantee repentance, submission, and commitment, thus enabling that person to persevere the rest of his or her life. A person's works then become a barometer by which to validate his or her salvation” (259). For those that have taken the gift of Faith and have learned to trust God, it will helped them to live boldly in faith in mighty ways.

In conclusion, Faith is not something that we can just get from anywhere, it is something that comes from within us, and that actually lives in us; we just have to believe in God from the bottom of our hearts. If we are expecting miracles to happen in order to increase our own faith, we may end up waiting for a very long time.

Works Cited

Achtemeier J. Paul. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary. New York, NY:HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.

Alexander Irene. (2014). “Faith Enlightens the Mind: Pope Francis’s Lumen Fidei and Contemporary Errors on the Nature of Divine Faith.” Nova et Vetera, English _ Edition, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2014): 11–23.

Morrisey Paul. (2015). “Faith in Faith. Reason, Faith, and Prayer in the Theology of Servais Pinckaers, OP.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought & Culture. (2015): 88-103.

Lopez A. Rene. (2007). “Is Faith A Gift From God or a Human Exercise?” BIBLIOTHECA SACRA 164. (July-September 2007): 259-276.