Ever strengthening our faith in Christ

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

“DO not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me.” (Jn 14,1) These words tell us clearly that Christ and God are one. Christ, we may argue, is just the Son in the Trinitarian God. He is just one person in three.

But we have to realize that the 3 persons in the Blessed Trinity are one God. The Father is God, The Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. Not three Gods but one God, as our Nicene Creed proclaims. Obviously, this is a mystery to us, since it is a supernatural truth. But Christ precisely took pains to prove that he and the Father and the Holy Spirit are just one God!

His many miracles and sublime teachings could already prove that. And as if these were not enough, it was his passion, death and resurrection that would definitely tell us that he is truly God even as he is also truly man.

The distinctive character of Christ is that as God who became man, he offers us “the way, the truth and the life” (Jn 14,6) meant for us, since we too have been made in God’s image and likeness.

We need to look for him and know him, so we can love and serve him, and ultimately become like him. In fact, we are meant to be one with him—“alter Christus,” another Christ, if not “ipse Christus,” Christ himself.

We should therefore develop the proper attitude and practices to enable us to keep an interest in looking for Christ, in knowing, loving and serving him, and ultimately in becoming one with him.

In this regard we cannot emphasize enough the need for a strong and abiding faith so that in whatever we do in our life, this urge to look, know, love, serve and become one with Christ is always pursued.

That is why we need a plan of ongoing formation and an over-all plan of life, consisting of certain practices of piety that would keep this ideal of a life of faith alive and working.

We need to develop a theological mind, that is, a mind that is not only fed by what our senses show us, what our observations, experimentations, our studies can tell us. We should have a mind that is always guided by faith first and last and all throughout.

In whatever we think, say or do, let’s always try to look for Christ so that we can find him, and in finding him we can start to love and serve him, and in the end become one with him.

To be sure, Christ is in everything and is precisely showing and sharing with us “the way, the truth and the life” in any situation and condition we may find ourselves in. This, of course, means that we have to have a deeply contemplative spirit which does not mean that we should stay away from the world.

We can always be contemplative even as we immerse ourselves in the world, as we should, if we would just bother to learn to be contemplative. The world and the temporal affairs we get involved in need not be an obstacle to becoming a contemplative soul. Precisely, these things can and should be the occasion, the material and the means to engage us with Christ, and thus, for us to be contemplative!

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com