15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 55:10-11
Second Reading: Rom 8:18-23
Gospel Reading: Mt 13:1-23
“A sower went out to sow,” Jesus says in the Gospel Reading. However, as the sower scattered the seed, not all of it fell on good ground: some fell on the path.
“When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path,” Jesus explains.
One of the people taking my course “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” was a lifelong Catholic. However, she said, her Catholicism had been largely “a cultural thing,” and now she wanted to “understand” it.
Many people think that there is no point in trying to understand what they believe because they think that faith is by its nature unreasonable—as the old joke says, “belief in what we know to be untrue.” They urge “have faith” when someone has cancer, meaning “believe that he will be cured,” even though they know he might die.
The truth is, as I emphasize in my course, that there are reasons for what we believe, and we should try to understand them. It is because they do not understand them that so many students, faced with new questions, abandon their faith at university.
“A believer desires to know better the one in whom he has put his faith and to understand better what he has revealed,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church; “a more penetrating knowledge will in turn call forth a greater faith.” As St. Augustine said, “I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe.”
However, faith is not just understanding. I knew someone who was attracted to the Church by its claims of authority. He studied the faith, thought about it deeply, and accepted it “with joy.” However, only a few months after his Baptism, he fell in love with a married woman and left the Church to marry her.
Had meeting this girl affected his reasons for becoming Catholic? No, it was his emotions and his desires that overcame his faith and his reason. What the Catechism calls the “battle of faith” is not between faith on one side and reason on the other, but between faith and reason on one side and emotion, imagination, and desire on the other.
Understanding what we believe entails using our reason: studying and evaluating the evidence rationally. However, if we want to remain rational, we must pray for “the gift of faith”: that is, for the power to go on believing the truth, not in the teeth of reason, but in the teeth of lust, terror, jealousy, boredom, indifference, and weakness.
“Faith” means “the things we believe,” as we say in the Creed. However, the Catechism says, it also means “the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that He has said and revealed to us, and that the Holy Church proposes for our belief, because He is truth itself.”
Faith in the sense of a virtue is the art of holding on to things our reason has once accepted, in spite of our feelings, our moods, and the superior attraction of other things. No conviction, however strong, will, of itself, end this sort of temptation to doubt. Only the practice of faith, resulting in the habit of faith, will gradually do that.
We have to nourish our faith: keeping what we believe before our minds, studying it, making and keeping Catholic friends, and participating in the Mass, where the Church prays what she believes.
God’s word will certainly accomplish what He intends—the salvation of humankind, says the First Reading. “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,” making the earth “bring forth and sprout,” God says, “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty.”
However, He invites our co-operation.
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available on YouTube in both written and audio form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, and will remain available until the end of August. Father will teach the whole course again, with new insights, starting August 30.