We know the ones who love us. We drink up and absorb their loving words and actions with all the instinctive alacrity of a fifth grader sucking up a giant milk shake. Our loved ones' words and actions and sheer ongoing presence heal us and build us up and fill us with such joy that we are happy to inhabit this world with them, And our joyful response to them fills them up with love and strength and joy.
Love is always an ongoing dance of giving and receiving, loving and being loved, speaking and listening, the deepening of trust, the deepening of self-revelations. Faith is trust in the goodness of our ongoing relationships. Faith is regular phone conversations and text messages, yearly birthday parties, meeting for breakfast once a week, sponging a feverish forehead, sitting in an emergency room or Hospice or funeral parlor. Faith in a relationship always blooms with the colors and textures of our daily lives.
Oh the wonder of catching someone's eye and sensing mutual attraction, as friend, or as lover. The first halting conversations. The first laugh as someone "gets" your joke. The first deep spiritual response as faith in God is shared. The first time someone dares to share a vulnerability, a mistake, tears over a failure. The first hug. For lovers, the first time holding hands, the first kiss. The first time emotional nakedness leads to physical nakedness and the awesome power of sexual intimacy sealing and celebrating the commitment of emotional and even spiritual intimacy. Vulnerability. Self-disclosure. Commitment to ongoing caring and communication. Faith is more than believing that someone loves us - faith in another is something that we live.
Faith in God is more than believing intellectually that God loves us. Faith in God is believing in an ongoing love relationship with God that we are living out in the colors and textures of our everyday lives. Faith in God mirrors God's faith in us. Every one of God's Words and actions reveals more of Who God is to us. Everyone and everything that God has created is spread out before us like a vast, intimate Love Letter to us which we could never read in a lifetime. Our faith in God is lived out in our daily conversations with God, filled with praise, thanks, tears, and joy, sometimes frustrations and questions. We hide nothing from God, because God has not hidden God's Self from us.
Having faith in God means experiencing our life with double vision. Every human touch of someone's cheek against ours transmits both human love and the divine love burning in that person's soul. Every handful of warm, moist earth is full of the promise of fertile created life waiting to nourish seeds - as well as redolent with the Creator's Divine Life joyously waiting to continue the work of creation. "For what can be known about God is perfectly plain, since God has made it plain. Through everything God has created, people can clearly see God’s invisible qualities—God’s eternal power and divine nature. So you have no excuse for not knowing God." —Romans 1:20.
Once we realize in our human relationships that we have to be willing to be vulnerable in disclosing who we are in order to truly "go deeper" in loving, then we understand how and why God had to become vulnerable by becoming human in Jesus. Jesus fully discloses Who God is to us! Jesus heals, teaches, weeps, loyally loves his people, suffers and dies for us. Jesus is raised from the dead as the Cosmic Christ, forever alive, holding all creation together in Himself. Jesus asks us to have an ongoing, unfolding, deepening relationship with him. He says to each of us, "Have faith in God and faith in me! Have faith that the Father, Spirit and I are good! Have faith that We are one in love and mercy! Have faith that you can trust Us with your life! Have faith that We are present in every event of your life! Trust God with who you are to the depth that God trusts you with Who God Is!"
Fr. Richard Rohr says,
"Faith is God’s self-exposure received and responded to trustfully. A genuine act of faith is always in response to a new disclosure. It is meant to be an ongoing dialogue of divine disclosure and human response—an ever deeper divine disclosure and an ever deeper human response—just like any human love affair. People who are incapable of vulnerability thus cannot get very far on the journey of faith. They usually substitute either religion itself or atheistic denial."
Faith is always about the give and take, the love and trust that exist in a living relationship - which is why it's never enough to simply believe intellectually that God as a Concept exists, or to believe that God lives "up there" but has nothing to do with me or my life, or to believe in what my religion teaches because it's part of belonging to my social circle.
No, faith is about love, wonder, awe, and trembling in any and every relationship. The awe that makes you cry as your dog faithfully leaps on you in joyous abandonment when you return from deployment in Afghanistan. The wonder that makes you smile when your faithful watering has coaxed your faithful orchid to bloom again. The trembling all over that overtakes you when you realize that you and your faithful beloved have created a child who kicks in your womb. Faith is always, always about life, about love, about trust, about relationship. Faith is falling on your knees in your bedroom and whispering lovingly to Jesus Who faithfully dwells in your heart "I adore you oh Christ and I bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world."
Faith is knowing with joy that you're stroking the cheek of God when ever you stroke your lover's cheek, or a beautiful leaf, or a dog's tail. God, present and revealing God's Self in everyone and everything God has created, is as simple and profound, as humbly hidden and actively healing, as that - every day of your life. Look around with sacred double vision, and you will find God. God Who feeds you with everything there is.
R. S. Thomas
The Moor
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.