In Theory: Faith just can’t be ‘manufactured’

How would you explain faith as a gift from God? What actions can people take to receive and/or increase faith?

If you’ve ever tried to ‘get faith,’ and nothing happened, then you know that faith is a gift from God. In other words, we can’t just manufacture it ourselves.

God’s initiative is half of a faith relationship, the half that’s beyond our control. And God has a choice, to show up — or not — for a meaningful spiritual encounter. As frustrated mystics over many centuries attest, no amount of wishing will make faith so. No amount of devoted prayer or practice, in and of itself, will produce a deep spiritual experience, unless God chooses that moment to meet us in grace.

It’s reassuring, if you think about it. It means that God has a will of God’s own. It counters that idea from Voltaire, that we might simply be creating God in the image of our own desire or need. It’s a little reassuring, that we can’t just ‘make God happen.’ That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do, or should do, to develop and deepen our faith. We’re the other side of a faith relationship, and it’s just as important for us to show up to the encounter as it is for God to be there.

There’s a million books that list forms of prayer and other spiritual disciplines that help us build our faith muscles.

All of them come down to this: Taking the time to seek God. Literally, taking the time, setting the time aside, every day, to pray or at least to sit quietly in God’s presence. It doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter what you do; the only thing that matters is that you dedicate the time, every day, to open a window between your soul and heaven.

Whether God chooses to reach through it at that particular moment is up to God — sometimes it will happen, and sometimes it won’t. Our part is to keep opening that window, opening ourselves, to God’s grace — and then waiting, like all those holy mystics, waiting, for God to touch us.

 AMY PRINGLE is rector of St. Geroge’s Episcopal Church in La Cañada. Reach her at (818) 790-3323, ext. 11.