Sinag: Keeping the Faith

Who would have thought that I would choose the “road less traveled”? I wasn’t even into philosophy, theology, liturgical affairs and all those things in between. Despite the seemingly silly interests and irreconcilable choices that I had I decided to give God’s call a chance. The day I entered the seminary premises was the start of my journey of discerning my call more deeply, seeking and figuring out why I responded to God’s invitation. As I grew in my faith inside the seminary, a new desire arose to do something great and remarkable with my life. I developed a desire to make sense of my faith and to spread my newfound love of God to others. So God’s plan for my life and my own conceptions about my future began to interact. I saw priesthood as the higher calling and, in a way, a better way for my life. I had a belief that, since I wanted to do amazing things for God, I must have a calling to the priesthood.

We all have different ideas in discerning God’s will. Discernment is the process by which you discover God’s will. Some discern God’s will by going with their gut feel, while others spend their lifetime trying to figure out what it is God wants them to do. Discerning God’s will is one of the most important things we can do in our lives, but it becomes a difficult task when we’re not sure what it is we’re really looking for. Discerning God’s will means learning to listen to God’s voice in our hearts and follow what He wants for our lives.

Being at peace with one’s vocation is a great gift. But this gift is not easy to find. The process of discernment may take months or years of listening to God, growing in the spiritual life and growing as a person. For each of us discerning his or her calling, it allows God to enter one’s life and offer affirmation. It is in finding our “calling” that we will find joy, comfort and peace in serving God and our fellow human beings.

Every discernment should move towards a decision. This might seem easier said than done. And indeed making decisions is tough. Leaving the seminary was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. As I look back I have no regrets whatsoever that I left the place I once called home. I will surely miss those days, but I will not lose the rich, amazing, memorable and grace-filled experiences I had. Discerning out of the seminary allowed me to make a “leap in the dark” or as Kierkegaard would say, “a leap of faith”. Though uncertain, my only assurance is the belief that everything is grace and that alone sustains me that I have not made the wrong choice. It might sound a bit cliché, but I really would like to think that indeed, many are called but few are chosen. Needless to say, God continued to reveal that He was calling me for something else.

If there is one thing that I have come to realize after spending about half of my life inside the seminary, it is about keeping the faith. Having faith means also having to gamble, to take chance on life and of love. Faith is always faith in a person. You can’t have faith in a thing. You have to have faith in a person for it is the person that makes faith work. When we gamble in love, we gamble on a person. Not on the concept of love, or the emotion that comes along with it, but on the person we love. We take a chance that this person is worthy of love, that he/she is capable of giving genuine love in return without footnotes or conditions, or expiration dates.

It’s always easy to gamble on God’s love because God has proven Himself worthy of love, and generous with His love for us time and time again. We can all think of a hundred occasions when God was good to us and loved us without restrictions. It is indeed easy to trust in God’s love.

It’s much harder to put faith on human affairs because we are not always sure if our friend will truly be a good one. We cannot always be sure that a woman will be a good wife or a mother in the same way that a man will be a good husband and a father. Or that he or she will love us forever, “for better or for worse.” The evidence isn’t always there. We always say that you have to have faith in marriage, but what we really mean is that we have to have faith in our husband or wife. When a couple makes their promise of commitment in marriage, they put their trust and confidence in the kind of person they are. When a man has a record of unfaithfulness, or a woman is always breaking her promises, it’s hard to believe. It is almost impossible to have faith because faith is essentially a person thing. Thus, it takes a lot of courage to put faith in love because our fears and insecurities can get in the way. Our love is often fickle; we mess things up. We hate people; we are selfish; we are proud. The irony of it all is that sometimes we hurt those we love the most.

It took courage and faith from Abraham to accept God’s apparent command to sacrifice his own son. It also took courage for Mary to say “yes” to the message of the angel Gabriel. They were afraid, unsure, and insecure, but they took the risk. They gambled on the Lord. All of them had to overcome fear in order to follow the Lord and so is our human relationships. We have to have courage in order to love.

It also takes hope to be a gambler in love. Hope, genuine hope is also realistic. It realizes how human beings are and how difficult it is to find real love in this cynical world we live in. God realizes better than anyone else how weak and sinful we are, how often we fail, and yet He keeps on loving us hoping that we will grow steadfast in our love for Him and for His people. The Lord took chances on sinners because He was full of hope in their love. God takes a chance on us all the time, doesn’t He? He puts his faith on us and hopes that we will be good, holy people, that we will love Him in return. That’s why we have to put our faith on other people, too. We too have to take a chance on them.

In our lives, both human and spiritual, faith is also the beginning and the foundation of happiness for all real love is based on faith. And it is indeed what the journey of marriage is. It is a venture; it is a gamble. I may never know what lies beyond the horizon. I may never know what lies ahead of us. I know only for certain that the journey must be undertaken for I know that the journey of love is the only path to happiness; we just have to trust the person we love and embrace him/her with all our faith forever and a day.