Your faith

In today’s gospel, Jesus tells the Canaanite woman, “O woman, great is thy faith”. This woman, we are told, was not member of the community that followed Jesus…she was an outsider; how can she have faith greater that those who have been following Jesus? What kind of faith was it? What does it mean to have faith like hers? What is faith?

Faith is not easy today for any of us. To have real faith, an actual belief in God, requires something more than simply continuing to roll with the flow of our own particular faith communities. Being born into a Christian family and worshiping within a Christian church can give us a relationship to a religion, to an ideology, to a truth, and to a community of worship; but these things, of themselves, are not the same thing as an actual faith in God. Just as we have people who believe but do not practice, many of us practice but do not believe. To actually believe in God today, one must at some point make a deep, private act of faith. To make an act of faith requires an inner journey, a journey into the deepest recesses of the soul where you must face your weakness, your sin of infidelities, lies, rationalizations, constant avoiding of the searing truth. Ultimately, that is what each of us needs from God—someone who can console us and someone to be for us that trusted confessor, that person before whom no secret need to be hidden. To relate to God in this way is to have faith. And this means consistently sharing all of our secrets and fears in those lonely, private hours when there are just the two of us and nobody else is around.

Jesus often warned against the danger of a superficial worship, an anonymous practice. A religious life that is simply a repetition of rituals instead of being a reflection on the rituals and their impact in our life. The woman from Canaan story teaches us that God values more our personal relationship with Him more than “anything else we want to do for him”.