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How to Overcome Obstacles to Faith

This Rock Volume 17, Number 6   July-August 2006     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   Divorce, Dissolution, and Death: The English Martyrs By Bess Twiston-Davies   Further Reading   Being in, but Not of, the World By Donald DeMarco   Further Reading   Life Beyond Confirmation: How to Revive the Ancient Practice of Mystagogy By Stratford Caldecott   How to Overcome Obstacles to Faith   Start a Mystagogy Group with Friends   Further Reading   The Truth Will Make You Free By Christopher Kaczor   Inspired by the Holy Spirit? Or a Cult? By Pete Vere   Damascus Road After Years of Church-Hopping, I'm Here to Stay By Kyle Duncan   By the Book Authority to Teach By Jim Blackburn   Truth Be Told The Cathedral Setting By Matthew E. Bunson   Up a Notch Did the Church Change Its Stance on Usury? By Christopher Kaczor   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

Even once we know we want to delve deeper into our faith, it’s not always easy to take the first steps. Sometimes we need friends around us, or feel we need the support of our parish, before we can make some progress. The first thing to do, of course, is to pray, even if you have to do so on your own. (Remember the angels, as well as the saints, are there to help you.) But there are other potential obstacles to overcome. Some people may have experienced abuse, misogyny, or clericalism within the Church. Some people have been hurt deeply by people in the Church, and this can undermine their ability to trust—and even their faith.

If such worries begin to trouble us, we need to remember something important. The Church is not a community of the perfect. Most Christians are not even very good people (and the best of them are aware of that fact). The constant failure of believers to live up to their faith is inevitable for the simple reason that the Church as it exists in time is not yet perfect. At any given moment, souls are rising or falling, responding to grace and resisting it. To the extent that we resist the grace of God, the Church is in the process of dying in us. To the extent that we respond to grace, the Church flickers back into life. And when a person wins through to eternal life, even at the last possible moment (like the thief on the cross next to Jesus or the workers of the eleventh hour in the parable), a new member is added to the Church triumphant.

The challenges to faith that we confront as we struggle to live a more spiritual or ethical life are both inevitable and necessary. The struggle is what it is all about. We will always feel like failures, but the very experience of failure should help us to throw ourselves on the mercy of God and to "depend on heaven" (as the modern mystic Adrienne von Speyr used to say). The spiritual method of St. Therese of Lisieux, known as the "Little Way," is entirely based on the continual sense of utter dependence upon God. This does not require passivity. The Virgin Mary was not passive but active when she said "Yes" to God or when she told the servants at the wedding in Cana to do what Jesus told them and so brought about the changing of water into wine.

Mary can be a model to us of each stage of the spiritual life. In fact, the lives of the saints demonstrate that obedience to God is not the kind of obedience that suppresses individual personality. On the contrary, because God is forever the source of our own life and deepest self, by uniting our wills with his we become more distinctively ourselves, not less. It is "doing our own thing" and seeking to indulge our own will that (paradoxically) diminishes us.