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The Five Ways to Lose Your Faith: Problems and Solutions

Associate Pastor's Column

Sunday, May 28, 2006

The popular anaphora is that the definition for insanity is to continue to do the same thing over and over and expect different results. Mental illness is of course deeper than that, and the anaphora fails to take into account things like the influences of personal evil spirits. But it does accurately portray one aspect of some forms of insanity.

I mention this because many of us continue to live and think like those people around us who have lost their faith, and fail to realize that we go down the same road. If worldly lives of worldly people brought them to abandon their faith, can we reasonably assume that we will not succumb to the same problem if we live just as they?

There are five chief ways to lose one’s faith; but there are also remedies. The five causes are:

1. Sin. (I hope my one-word-clarity erases any room for fuzzy logic.) Sin corrupts faith, hope and charity. Venial sin merely chips away at all three of these theological virtues. Mortal sin totally destroys supernatural hope and love, and darkens the faith but without destroying it. Those who abandon themselves to habits of sin – different from the weak sinner who frequently repents, confesses and is contrite – will eventually abandon the Catholic Church, there’s no two ways about it. If you have a habit of sin, I give you this prescription: name your sin, confess it as often as it happens to the priests of the Church, consider what the opposite virtue of that sin is, and then promise each day to do one act of the virtue you wish to conquer (cf. Rom 12:21).

2. Worldliness. Faith introduces us to eternal life; a lack of faith introduces us to the passing, decaying temporal life. All things in this world pass, but God does not pass. St. James teaches, “The one who is rich… will pass away like a wild flower. For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business.” Let us overcome worldliness by humility, never attributing the cause of our goods to ourselves, but only to God.

3. Rationalism. This word can have many definitions; here I mean only this: that our guide is not our faith, but our proud human reason which has rejected faith. This is the case of the man who says, “I know my faith says this, but I am happy thinking and doing the opposite.” Or again, the one who changes the faith to suit himself and has his own comfortable version of it, instead of the one the Church passes on to all generations. We need to overcome this by unconditional obedience to the Church, knowing that it is led and taught by the Holy Trinity.

4. Ignorance. We often use the word “ignorant” as a taunt. It really means, “not knowing.” A Catholic destroys his own faith by being complacent with not knowing the content of the faith. No matter what one’s age, intelligence, social status, gender or whatever, all need to intellectually nourish the faith. On the contrary, we will loose it.

5. Distraction. We think about money, music, house, leisure, relationships… but how often do we think of the one thing that matters, God? Faith feeds on of the thoughts about God like the body on food. If we never think about God, we will loose our faith. If we think about God, what he has done in history, his teachings passed on to us through the Church in Scripture and Tradition, his work in the lives of the saints, his goodness, his truth, his beauty, and his might, our faith will grow and without any limit.

We are a people saved by faith in Jesus Christ, a faith made out of works, the works Jesus told us to do.

Picture: Fra Giovanni Angelico, The Ascension, 1387-1455. Thanks to http://www.cts.edu/ImageLibrary/life_of_Christ2.cfm.