What is Faith?

In the movie City Slickers, Billy Crystal asks and old cowboy "What is the meaning of life?"

He holds up a finger. "One thing," he says.
"What is it?"  Crystal answers.

"That's for you to find out," he says.
The "one thing" of our life is our true faith--our real god.  It is the thing that gives our life meaning, hope, and stability.  Paul Tillich calls this our "ultimate concern." (The Dynamics of Faith, page 4) It is the basis for our continued existence. 
Faith has been called a crutch--it's really more like a skeleton. Everything we say, do, feel, or hope connects to it.  Faith is our orientation towards a single object, which is the organizing principle behind all our actions.  Faith and spirituality are the same thing.
None of us can say we hold to our faith object perfectly. There's an element of hypocrisy in the best of us.  Our lives are at times a soup of conflicting loyalties and half-realized certainties.  But nevertheless, there is always one thing we value more than all others. It shapes our thoughts, feelings and habits. That is our true faith, whether we realize it or not. It is our true object of worship, our real god.
 “No one can serve two masters," Jesus said in Matthew 6:24. "Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." He could have said God and country, God and family, God and personal fulfillment, or anything else, and it would have been just as true. Our faith is our master, whether it be self,  community, or God. It is the single thing that brings fulfillment and strength to our lives. 
The worth of our faith comes out under pressure.   We may go for years without thinking of God or faith.   Then we suffer a shocking tragedy—a divorce, or a terminal illness.   Suddenly we need a reason to endure.   Like a student who has never studied, we are unprepared for the final examination.   The dimly recalled beliefs of childhood are not enough.   Our faith needs to be able to accommodate loss and death.   If we do not have mature, thoughtful answers, we may find no reason to continue.One way of describing how faith works is to imagine our lives as having three sides--our mind, heart, and habits.  Faith stands behind all three, lending strength to each part.  Faith stands behind our beliefs, and lead to our adoption of a belief system. It provides a filter for assessing information.  It stands behind our emotional life, too, regulating, restraining, and encouraging our feelings of love,  disgust,  fear, and courage.  It stands behind our habits also,  giving us the motivation to develop some habits and suppress others

Jesus illustrated this with a parable in Matthew 7:24-27:
“Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.   The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.  
 “But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.  The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.
Wind and rain represent the stresses of life—illness, death, change, or trouble.   If our spiritual base is not adequate to cope, then our lives will collapse like a house without foundation.
We can illustrate faith this way. 
Imagine our lives as a triangle. three sides--our Mind,  Heart, and Habits hang together in mutual support.  Our faith object is the center of them.  It is what gives shape to the others.  Our faith interacts with each side. To our minds, faith gives reasons for existence and a basic mental architecture that enables us to cope with new information. Our faith is strengthened by knowledge, even while it gives us a structure to assess right from wrong.  To our emotions, faith provides a filter and a reason to restrain and encourage. We hold back our tongues from hurt,  deny our tendencies to give up or be depressed,  as well as encouraging love, tenderness and praise, based on our relationship to our object of faith.
To our actions, or habits,  it gives us a reason for breaking bad habits and developing good ones.  Our faith  is strengthened by developing habits of worship, and weakened by habits that run contrary to our beliefs.
When stress comes into our lives in any of these areas,  our faith pushes back, as we see in this second illustration. When questions arise that we cannot answer,  faith pushes back.  When faced with overwhelming emotions such as grief or anger, faith gives us stability, and holds us strong. When the force of our negative habits threaten to ruin our lives, for example, when dealing with addictions of various kinds, our faith provided a "higher power" to break free.,
Without faith, we face breakdown and collapse. 
We need to know our faith--our true faith, not just our professed faith. We need a faith that tough enough to stand firm when the storms of life come raging.
So far, we have nor talked about any particular faith, but the function of faith in general. Right now, we are just talking about the role of faith in general. In later blogs, we will zero in on one particular system of faith, the Christian faith. But for now,  it is important to understand how faith works, and what it does.
Our "one thing" may be our religion, or it may be something different entirely. In the next two blogs, we will talk about the relationship between our faith and our belief.


Let me know what you think:

How does faith work in your life? Have there been times in your when faith has helped you survive, ?when your head, heart, or habits were challenged?
What do perceive is your real faith?  It is the same are your religion, or is it actually something altogether different.

---