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HANDOUT IN CL/VE 11 – LESSON 2: FAITH

FAITH
- A central reality in Filipino life;
- It is an everyday “natural” factor in all our human relationships and daily actions.
FAITH IN HUMAN RELATIONS
• We show our faith when we accept the words of others. (PANINIWALA)
• We show faith when we readily obey the directions of those over us. (PAGSUNOD)
• We show our faith when we entrust our welfare to others, even to strangers . (PAGTITIWALA
It is impossible to live without faith!

Genuine friendships create mutual loving knowledge of each other. In them, we experience something that
liberates us from our own narrowness and opens us to fuller life and love. We realize that friendship freely
offered us by another, also demands our free response. It is a response that is never just one act, but a long
process of growing intimacy with our friend. Inevitably, others among our families and associates are
eventually involved especially God.

FAITH - “Believing in God.”


CHRISTIAN FAITH - “Believing in the God revealed by Jesus Christ.”
CATHOLIC CHRISTIAN FAITH - “Believing that Christ reveals God to us in and through the Catholic Church,
the body of Christ, united in the Holy Spirit.”

“Believing” here means realizing that God is calling us to share His divine life- that is His pagpapakilala to us.
Faith is our personal response as “disciples of Christ” of accepting him “as Lord and Savior.” “It is our ‘Please come in!’
to Christ who stands at the door and knocks (Rv 3:20)” (PCP II 64).

FAITH IN GOD: Our total response to God’s revelation: “It is to know, to love, to follow Christ in the Church
he founded” (PCP II 36)

CHARACTERISTICS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH

1. Total and Absolute - Only Faith in God calls for a total and absolute adherence. Christ himself
provides, especially in his Passion, Death and Resurrection, the best example of this total and absolute
commitment to God.
2. Trinitarian - Faith is our friendship with Christ and through Christ with the Father, in their Holy Spirit.
Through Christ’s witness to his Father in his teaching, preaching, miracles, and especially in his
Passion, Death and Resurrection, we come to believe in Christ our Savior, in the Father, and in the
Holy Spirit sent into our hearts.
3. Loving, Maturing and Missionary - Our Christian faith is truly life-giving and mature only through love,
for “the man without love has known nothing of God, for God is love.” (1 Jn 4:8)

CHRISTIAN FAITH then, touches every part of us:


our minds (believing), our wills (doing), and our hearts (trusting).
BELIEVING - Faith is knowing, but not mere “head knowledge” of some abstract truths.
It is like the deep knowledge we have of our parents, or of anyone we love dearly.
Christian Faith, then, is personal knowledge of Jesus Christ as “my Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).
DOING - Faith is a commitment to follow (obey) God’s will for us.
This we see exemplified in Mary’s “I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me as you say” (Lk 1:38).
PCP II brings out this “doing” dimension of faith as “witnessing” through “loving service” of our needy
neighbors. In our concrete situation, particularly urgent is the call for: 1) deeds of justice and love; and 2) for
protecting and caring for our endangered earth’s environment (cf. PCP II 78-80).
ENTRUSTING - Faith is from the heart - the loving, trusting, and hoping in the Lord that comes from God’s own
love flooding our hearts. This trusting Faith “lives and grows through prayer and worship” - personal heartfelt
conversation with God that is the opposite of mindless, mechanical repetition of memorized formulas.
PARADOXICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FAITH
1. Certain yet Obscure - certain enough to die for, yet a “mystery” because like love, there is always
more to understand;
2. Free yet morally obliging - A free personal response to God, yet morally binding in conscience
3. Reasonable yet beyond Natural Reason - reasonable, yet beyond our natural ways of knowing;
4. An act yet a process - an individual act of our graced reason, yet also a life-long process
5. A gift yet our doing - A gift of God through both Revelation and interior inspiration, yet something we
do nobody can “believe” for us
6. Personal yet Ecclesial - A personal individual response, yet only possible as a member of the
Christian community, the Church.
WHAT DOES FAITH DO FOR US? Faith in Jesus Christ:
 helps us to grow into adult persons who can relate to others responsibly and maturely;
 liberates us from being enslaved by sin; and
 opens us to deep joy and happiness in the Lord.
HOW CAN WE BE SURE OF OUR FAITH? Faith is something like the loving knowledge we have of our family
and friends. We are “sure” of their love and we try to respond to them. Likewise, through God’s Revelation in
Christ, we are absolutely sure of His love for us, and try to respond through the gift of faith.
MODELS OF FAITH
• St. Lorenzo Ruiz
• Opted for a painful death in Nagasaki, Japan rather than to renounce his faith
• “If I have a thousand lives, I would give them all to God”
• St. Pedro Calungsod
• Visayan lay missionary violently killed at the Landrones Island where he taught catechism and assisted
at baptism
• Venerable Francisca del Espiritu Santo de Fuentes
• Persevered in founding her beaterio, carrying out faithfully her prayer life and social service despite the
opposition of the hierarchy at her time

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