Faith

Various Sayings on Faith

"Faith is an orientation of the soul to the will of God." -- Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, All Saints Monastery YouTube broadcast, October 17, 2008.

"Faith is an orientation of the soul, not an accord with a collection of facts. If sin ultimately means alienation from God, then its cure, true repentance, must consist in a radical re-orientation of one's mind, soul and life toward Jesus Christ and His great moral imperatives." -- Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, On The Nature of Sin

"Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; In whose heart are the highways to Zion." -Ps 84:5

"Even so, every good tree produces good fruit;" -Mt 7:17

"If you are always submitted to the Will of God, you cannot be anxious for anything!" -- Mother Gavrilia

"The opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is a very big part of faith. We're always wrestling with doubt. But the real opposite -- the enemy of faith -- is self will. Doing what we want to do, when we want to do it, how we want to do it, for the reasons we think we should do it." -- Fr. John Hanesworth, Paridosis Podcast, June 18, 2008.

"A miracle is not the breaking of the laws of the fallen world, it is the reestablisment of the laws of the Kingdom of God. A miracle happens only if we believe that the law depends not on the power, but on the love of God. Although we know that God is almighty, as long as we think that he does not care, no miracle is possible. To work it, God would have to enforce his will, and that he does not do. Because at the very core of his relationship to the world, even fallen there is his absolute respect for human freedom and rights. The moment you say, 'I believe, and that is why I turn to you', implies, 'I believe that you will be willing that there is love in you and that you are actually concerned about every single situation'. The moment this grain of faith is there, the right relationship is established, and a miracle becomes possible." - Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer

"A person who does not know God is like a lamp which has been unplugged. You can change the light bulb as often as you like until our Lord returns; turn the switch as many times as you wish; but the light will not come on unless the lamp is plugged into it's source of power. In the same way, we must be 'plugged in' to Him who gives us life, that is God, our creator." -- Bishop BASIL (Essey), Bishop of Wichita and the Antiochian Diocese of Mid-America, on the occasion of the funeral of Sbdcn John Dutcher, 11 August, 2008.

"Live simply and without thinking too much, like a child with his father. Faith without too much thinking works wonders. The logical mind hinders the Grace of God and miracles. Practice patience without judging with the logical mind." -- St. Paisios the Athonite

Faith versus Belief

"God is our starting point. God is a given. In the beginning God. We either start with God or we start with matter. Stuff. It is either God or matter. Either God said, or stuff exploded, in a big bang. You either start with one or the other, and neither choice is provable. Ultimately, it is a choice of which you wish to say came first. For us, the Eastern Orthodox Christians, God is. We do not prove his existence. For us, his existence is our starting point, and if you demand proof, the proof is in the experience. If you’re unwilling to experience the presence of God, because you’ve a priori said, “That can’t happen,” then you’re left with nothing but a bunch of stuff that had to explode, sometime." -- Dn. Ezra (Herb) Ham, Evangelion: Intro to the Orthodox Christian Faith / Session 1, YouTube 7 November, 2015

"What does it mean to believe? The verses prior to [John] 3:16 are the clue. 'And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.' Jesus gives us the back story. In the Old Testament when the ancient Israelites had left Egypt, they came into an area that was infested with poisonous snakes. Many people were bitten, and some died. God told Moses to make a brass snake, and to place it on a pole. And he told the people that anyone who was bitten by the snake could come and look at the snake on the pole and they would live. This is our clue to what it means to believe. It was not enough for someone to believe intellectually the statement about a snake on a pole, that they would be healed. They literally had to go and look at the snake on the pole, and then, and only then, were they healed. Believing is something we do in our lives, not in our heads.

"We believe with our feet, not our minds. In English the word to believe has come to mean the acceptance of statements. I believe these statements, and the statements I believe are then called, 'my beliefs'. And that's all that John 3:16 means to most people. They believe the verse. They believe the statement. They accept as true, one single verse out of the whole Bible, and they think they are a Christian, and have eternal life. But in the original Greek, the word 'believe' is the word 'faith'. 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. That whoever 'faiths' in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.' To believe is not simply to intellectually accept or agree with a statement. To believe is to believe in a person... ...To believe in God is not simply to believe in his existence. The demons do that much. It was not enough for a person, bit by a snake, to stay in his tent and say that he believed that if he looked at that snake on a pole he would be healed. It was not what those who had been bitten by the snake said they believed that mattered. It was what they did. Their behavior showed what they believed when they got up, went and stood before the snake on the pole. It is not enough to believe in a statement. Believing is existential. It is experiential. Believing is a sacramental event where we become a recipient of the mystery that is hidden in the reality before us. Believing is not done with our heads. It is done with our lives; with our hearts; with our whole being. Our relationship with God is an active response to the divine summons. It is not a passive contemplation of the divine." -- Dn. Ezra (Herb) Ham, Evangelion: Intro to the Orthodox Christian Faith / Session 1, YouTube 7 November, 2015

"The moment when we see ourselves so clearly that we can only see God is the moment we do the desperate thing. We will crawl on our hands and knees through the crowd to touch the hem of a dirty robe with an unclean hand. We will start out in hope on the long walk toward home, smelling like a pig. We will annoy a crowd by shouting 'Have mercy on me!' and shamelessly throw ourselves in front of God and wash His feet with our tears, no matter who is watching and judging. No humiliation, no distance, no commandment is so great as to kill our hope of being freed from ourselves. Man calls this desperation. God calls it faith." -- (Stephen Robinson, From "Fire From Ashes", that I co-authored and illustrated with Fr. Joseph Hunneycutt).

Faith Revealed by Christ

"For our faith, brethren, is not of men nor by man, but by revelation of Jesus Christ, which the divine Apostles preached, the holy Ecumenical Councils confirmed, the greatest and wisest teachers of the world handed down in succession, and the shed blood of the holy martyrs ratified." -- Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848

Father Alexander Schmemann on Faith

"Unless I see…I will not believe" (John 20:25). So said Thomas, one of Christ's twelve disciples, in response to the joyful news of those who had seen their crucified and buried Teacher risen from the dead. Eight days later, as recorded in the gospels, when the disciples once again were all together, Christ appeared and told Thomas: "Put your finger here and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side; be not faithless, but believing." And Thomas exclaimed: "My Lord and my God!" Then Christ told him: "You have believed because you have seen me; blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe…" (John 20:24-31).

Millions of people today think and speak essentially like Thomas, and assume that this is the only correct approach worthy of any thinking person. "Unless I see, I will not believe…" In our contemporary speech isn’t this the "scientific approach?" But Christ says: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." This means that there is, and was, another approach, another standard, another possibility. True, others may say, but that approach is naïve and not rational; it's unscientific; it's for people who are backward; and since I'm a person of the modern world, "Unless I see, I will not believe."

We live in a world of great oversimplification and therefore spiritual poverty. "Scientific" or "Unscientific." People use words like these all the time as if they were self-evident and self-explanatory, and they use them because everyone else also uses them, without reflection, without debate. In fact, they themselves believe these reductions blindly and simplistically, and so any other approach appears to them as neither serious nor worthy of attention. The question is already decided. But is that really true? I just said that we live in a world of great spiritual poverty. And indeed, if the end result of humanity's interminable development boils down to this pronouncement, "I won't believe it till I see it"; if the human race looks upon this as the height of wisdom and reason's greatest victory, then our world truly is poor, superficial, and most all, incredibly boring. If I only know what I see, touch, measure and analyze, then how little I really know! The whole world of the human spirit falls by the wayside, all the intuition and profound knowledge that flow not from "I see" or "I touch," but from "I think" and, most importantly, "I contemplate."

What falls away is that realm of knowledge which for centuries was rooted not in external, observable experience, but in another human faculty, an amazing and perhaps inexplicable ability that sets human beings apart from everything else and makes them truly unique. Even robots, machines and computers can now touch, handle and manipulate objects; they can make accurate observations, and even make predictions. We know that they actually perform better than human beings in measuring, comparing, making exact observations flawlessly; they are more accurate, more "scientific." But here is what no robot, under any circumstances, will ever be able to do: to be filled with wonder, to be awed, to have feelings, to be moved by tenderness, to rejoice, to see what can't be seen by measurement or analysis of any kind. No robot will hear those unheard sounds that give birth to music and poetry; no robot will ever cry, or trust. But without all this doesn't our world become colorless, boring and, I would say, unnecessary? Oh yes, planes and spaceships will fly ever further and faster. But where to and what for? Oh yes, laboratories will conduct their analyses with ever increasing accuracy. But to what end? "For the good of humanity," I'm told. I understand, so this means that one day we will have a healthy, well fed, self-satisfied human being walking about, who will be totally blind, totally deaf and totally unaware of his deafness and blindness.

"Unless I see I will not believe." Clearly, however, observable experience, empirical data, is just one form of knowledge, the most elementary, and therefore the lowest form. Empirical analysis is useful and necessary, but to reduce all human knowledge to this level is like trying to comprehend the beauty of a painting by a chemical analysis of its paint. What we call faith is at a second and higher level of human knowledge, without which, it can be claimed, man would be unable to live even a single day. Every person believes in something or someone, so the only question is whose faith, whose vision, whose knowledge of the world corresponds more accurately and more completely to the richness and complexity of life.

Some say that the resurrection of Christ must be a fabrication since the dead do not rise. True, if there is no God. But if God exists, then death must be overthrown, since God cannot be a God of decay and death. Others will then say: but there is no God, since no one has seen him. But how then do you account for the experience of millions of people who joyfully affirm that they have seen, not with their physical eyes, but with a profound and certain inner sight? Two thousand years have passed, but when the joyful proclamation "Christ is risen!" descends as if from heaven, all still send out the same triumphant response, "Truly He is risen!"

Is it really true that you neither see nor hear? Is it really true that in the deepest part of your consciousness, away from all analysis, measurements and palpation, you neither see nor feel any undying, radiant light, you do not hear the sounds of an eternal voice: "I am the way, the resurrection and the life…"? Is it really true that in the depth of your soul you do not recognize Christ within us, within me, answering Doubting Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe?" -- Homily on the Sunday of Thomas

Faith Means Transformation Not Acceptance

"The love of Christ is never a love that 'accepts people as they are': it is always a love that takes people as they are, and changes them into something new, precious, and divine." -- Archimandrite Irenei Steenberg

Even Heretics Appear to have Christ

"Even the heretics appear to have Christ, for none of them denies the name of Christ. Yet, anyone who does not confess all that pertains to Christ does in fact deny Christ." -- St. John Chrysostom

Pour Your Oil on the Eyes of Your Heart

"Is it from the door of the sepulcher, or of your own hearts? From the tomb, or from your own eyes? You whose heart is shut, whose eyes are closed, are unable to discover the glory of the open grave. Pour then your oil, if you wish to see that glory, not on the body of the Lord, but on the eyes of your hearts. By the light of faith you will then see that which through the deficiency of faith now lies hidden in darkness." -- St. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 82.16

See also Fundamentalism