FAITH IS FAITH IS FAITH

FAITH IS FAITH IS FAITH

by Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD cannot be proven, processed, reasoned, justified or legitimated. This God-knowing and God-energy always risks being misunderstood (as God also risks) and risks being misinterpreted (as God puts up with) and even risks being not appreciated (as God also feels). 

To live in faith – which is to live with God – one has to risk looking and feeling like nothing – nothing that can be possessed, bargained for, developed, controlled, sold, bought, measured, merited, applauded, or even rightly communicated. Faith, finally, is beyond the world of power, function and purpose. 

I must say it or I would deny the entire history of faith from Abraham to Jesus to Francis of Assisi to our own Donny Flowers and Erwin Wolke: Faith is beyond any reasonable and objective process that even good people can devise. There is no community program or structure, no matter how perfect or how much we own it or invest in it, that will ever make biblical faith unnecessary. Faith is faith is faith. And God can only be known by faith (see Romans 3-5). I wonder why religious people so easily forget that? 

Faith is finally to stand in nothingness, with nothing to prove and nothing to protect, knowing itself in an ever-alive charity that urges us to surrender, to let go, to give away, to hand over, to forgive, to walk across, to take no offense, to trust another, to lose oneself – while being quite sure that we are going to find ourselves afterward. 

A consumer-oriented, functional and materialistic age finds faith almost impossible. We want religion, but we surely do not want faith. Because if faith is nothing, the faithful person is a nobody. In our shallow culture, trust is called naïveté. Forgiveness always looks like being soft and conceding to the enemy – even speaking the truth will not win you any votes or look patriotic on the evening news. Faith is nothing in this age and culture. Faith always has been nothing. 

From “Image and Likeness: The Restoration of the Divine Image” in John Bookser Feister (Editor), RADICAL GRACE – DAILY MEDITATIONS BY RICHARD ROHR, 1993, pages 70-71.

Jakarta, 22 May 2012 

A Christian Pilgrim