Meditations on Living My Faith

By Ignacio Götz

In one of his sermons, Saint Augustine asked his congregation, "Do you believe?" And they answered, "Yes, we believe!" He told them: "Then live your faith and you have true faith." I used to think that this meant that I should make my life conform to the tenets of my faith. If I believe in life everlasting, I should not make this earth a permanent abode. If I believe that God became incarnate in Jesus, then I should respect and cherish all the flesh, that is, all the people sanctified by His presence and so forth. But then, one day, I realized that if to believe is to establish contact with God, then to live my faith is to be enlivened by that immeasurable source of life. Faith is like a switch between the little motor that runs my life and the Dynamo from which all power comes. To believe, to turn on the switch, is to be turned on, to be set in motion in the world. Living my faith means paramountly to let the divine energy flow through me. The details are secondary. They are a help to me to concentrate on the source of my inner life. But the important thing is to be the conduit through which the water Source tapped by faith flows freely into the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644161999

Book preview

The Sacramental World

With the beginning of time God created the world. He fashioned everything out of nothing: light, the planets and stars, heaven and earth, plants and animals, and finally humans, the crown of creation. And God looked around and saw all that He had made. And all these things were good. And He had created them out of nothing.

God seems to work best when He produces things out of nothing. Witness the heavens and the earth and all the glory thereof! But if I want God to work marvels in me, if I want God to give me His help to ponder over His mysteries and reach a certain understanding of them, then I must realize that I am nothing.

I must present myself before God as nothing, so that His omnipotent Word may work wonders in me, so that His all-powerful Word may recreate the world through me. I must empty myself till I reach the depths of nothingness so that God may dwell in me. Such a dwelling place will be good, for God will have created it out of nothing, just as He created the world.

And He will see Himself in me just as He sees Himself in the rest of the world. For God dwells in the world. The world is like the sacramental veil that hides the Real Presence from my mortal eyes. And just as from the foundation of the world humans have caught sight of God’s invisible nature, of His eternal power and of His divinesses as these are known through His creatures (St. Paul), so also I must learn to tear apart the veil before my eyes and discover behind it the God who made the heavens and the earth.

I must make myself ready to receive the salutary influence of God through the sacramentality of the world; I must attune my ears to the words He utters, open my eyes to see His holy name written all over this universe. For the heavens sing forth the glory of the Lord (Psalm 19). Indeed, He has passed through the world scattering a thousand graces, and looking upon it as He went, He has left it, by His glance alone, clothed with matchless beauty (St. John of the Gross).

I should therefore strive to discover my God, my Creator, hidden behind the beauty and grandeur of the world.

And indeed heaven and earth and all that is in them tell me wherever I look that I should love Him. Not the beauty of any bodily form, nor the order of the seasons, nor the brightness of light and the colors that please my eye, nor the sweet melodies of songs, nor the fragrance of flowers; none of these things should I love but the Lord my God, my Creator.

For all these things are not God, but the sacrament of His presence. I asked the earth if it was God, and it answered: ‘I am not He.’ And all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps, and they answered: ‘We are not your God; Seek higher!’ I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it, and it answered: ‘I am not God.’ I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered: ‘Neither are we the God whom you seek!’ And then I asked all things that surrounded me, things I know through my senses: ‘Tell me of the God I seek, since you are not He.’ And they cried out aloud: ‘He made us!’ My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty. (St. Augustine).

For God has given a mouth to His creation, to praise Him.(Odes of Solomon VII).

For this universe is like a colossal temple, a temple open to everybody and at all times, a temple wherein I, the simplest of children, can find the God I love and worship, if I but learn to discover His presence behind this sacramental veil, the beauty of the world; if I but let Him love me through the sacrament of His world.

The Believing Church

What a wonderful sight, these thousands of martyrs! No age, sex, or state of life lacks them. No way of torture has been left untried on them. No age of the Church has been deprived of them.

Stephen, Perpetua, the hundreds of martyrs under Nero and Diocletian, the Japanese martyrs, the American martyrs, Mexican, Chinese, Hungarian martyrs, and the thousands of martyrs we know not of. And why did they die? Because of one Man. Rather, for one Man.

Millions of people have also died for other men, for their own countries, for Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon . . . What an astonishing spectacle it is to see those hordes of savage troops crossing the Alps, following Hannibal; or following a defeated Napoleon out of Russia; or crossing the Rubicon with Caesar. But this is something different, the followers of this Man. Soldiers followed Rommel, Hannibal, and Attila for a time. But who would follow them now after they have been dead for so many years? Indeed, people’s minds can change so quickly, forget so quickly! It was so with Jesus of Nazareth, acclaimed on Palm Sunday, crucified on Good Friday. And yet it has been different. Because all down the centuries, people have been giving their lives for that one Man, the Crucified.

Today, two thousand years after His death, people continue to give up their lives for Him, people continue to follow Him till death, till martyrdom. This must be a nagging question for a person without faith, for a person in whose eyes the crucified one is just a Man. It must be as unintelligible as to hear, say, that people have given up their lives for Aristotle or for Plato or for Pontius Pilate. Because the reason why these people, all these martyrs, died for this one Man is their belief that He was God. For we can prove God, the Abstract Absolute, as the conclusion of a syllogism. But it is only by faith that we find God in Jesus Christ. And so, as with many other things, facts of life that confront us, the spectacle of that numberless mass of martyred people is absurd without