3 ways to persevere in your faith
In the last talk of the Beloved Retreat, we were talking about resolutions and someone asked “what do I do if I fail again and again in trying to achieve them?” After a Retreat, we all have desires to be closer to God. We experience His closeness in a retreat and want to continue that experience into our life. But how do we keep it up if we see our failings more clearly?
Humanly speaking we believe progress is linear and incremental. Something doesn’t work, we fix it. It’s slow, we make it faster. Everything can get better with time: infrastructure, technology, science… But God and our relationship with Him is not like that. It can’t be measured in the same way.
The patience of God
God is patient. Maybe we don’t like it sometimes, that we need to be patient with ourselves because we mistakenly think patience is an admission of failure. But patience is acceptance, not resignation. We experience events and encounters each day that are out of our control. We can resist and change many things according to our wishes; but there are many other things, we must accept what comes and is given to us. To understand this and act accordingly is patience. To be unwilling to do this is in constant conflict and frustration.
We only have to look at nature to see this. It’s messy. There is obviously a certain order but it’s not as orderly as we would like it. We tend to like it more orderly than God does – rows of flowers, perfectly cut hedges, clean lines of crops… we need to avoid translating our order to the spiritual life, but accept the messiness. Accept God's order and patience. Be content in that messiness and disorder, and welcome it. There is a lot to learn there.
Inner Poverty
Our journey towards Christ inevitably involves facing ourselves and our sins. The closer we walk towards Him, the more we feel our inner poverty. It can feel contradictory because we think we should feel more spiritually fulfilled. In part, that is true but there is also that realisation of our shortcomings. Much like St Peter when he got close to Our Lord and exclaimed “Depart from me, Lord, for I am sinful man”.
Fr John Henry Hanson has a beautiful book, called Home Again, where he touches this topic beautifully. He says:
“It’s no good to make ourselves dependent on another’s affirmations, inspirational sayings, motivational music, etc., to put us in a place of confidence and peace. By all means, receive affirmation graciously, make use of inspirational sayings, images, and songs. But avoid so stringing them together that they form a diversion from your inner poverty. There is an undeniable emptiness within us all, a void fillable by God alone. He knows it’s there: the Lord created it for himself as his “personal space.” Ignorant of its purpose, we dread its presence, and try to forget or fill it the best we can. But until we acknowledge it, and try to figure out what God wants us to do with it, we doom ourselves to a more or less continual fruitless search for substitutes, novelty, a distraction”.
When we wobble in our faith, injecting only your feelings with peace and confidence will mask our true poverty. We need to enter that void that we may feel, that inner poverty, and ask God to fill it for us. By letting Him in, we also let ourselves into that space and discover how God sees us: someone He loves beyond all measure.
Power of grace
Grace is a gift from God. Everything that God gives us is a gift for our sanctification. When we feel our inner poverty, rather than lead to discouragement, we should lean on his grace: in Confession and the Eucharist. Grace is an infusion of the Holy Spirit to heal our soul of sin and sanctify it. It is inevitable that we will fall. Be reassured that Christ instituted the Sacraments for that very purpose: the “First Aid Kit” for our falls. In the same way, we don’t ignore a sprain or a break when we fall, we shouldn’t either ignore our falls in the spiritual sense. To sit there and be down about it will not heal anything, but going to the Sacraments will always heal us.
Persevering in our faith is about deepening in our relationship with God. Resolutions our goals are a means to an end, the path to understanding ourselves and God a little bit more. So when, you don’t reach the mark as you would like, ask yourself this simple question – Am I willing to return to Him and begin again? If the answer is “Yes”, you are already in God and with God, trusting Him, despite everything and that is Faith.