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Oct
31
Co-Workers of the Truth 10/31
Posted By reynor | Filed Under Co-Workers of the Truth
What direction does a person choose for his existence if he has decided to tune the instrument of his life to the keynote of “faith”? This question is not an easy one to answer because it obviously reaches down to the deeper levels of human nature, to attributes that are not always visible on the surface but that penetrate and leave their imprint on the whole, yet without being anywhere measureable. All the important fundamental decisions of human existence that go beyond our ordinary concern about the details of everyday living can be understood if we ourselves make some small effort to enter into the movement from which they flow - whether it is a question of a great love, of the passion of the inventor, or of a renunciation required of those who devote their lives to a revolutionary idea; whether it is a question of the attitude expressed in the smile of a Buddha or the faith of a Christian…We can explain what faith really means for an individual only by pointing to the lives of those who have lived it in its fullness: Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, IGnatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Vincent de Paul, John XXIII; in such persons, and basically only in them, can we come to know what kind of decision faith is. As we can see in the lives of such individuals, faith is a kind of passion, or, more correctly, a love that seizes an individual and shows him the direction he must go, however fatiguing it may be - the spiritual equivalent, perhaps, of a mountain to climb, which to the ordinary Christian would seem foolish indeed but to one who has committed himself to the venture is clearly the only direction to take - a direction he would not exchange for any conceivably more comfortable one.
From: Glaube und Zukunft, pp.39-40
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