Go Deep in Prayer and in the Study of Our Faith
Excerpt from the address delivered by Cardinal Collins' at the 43rd annual Cardinal's Dinner on November 15, 2022.
The more the heavy hand of secularism presses upon us, the more we must go deep, in prayer and in the knowledge of our faith. Lately, I have been urging Catholics to read each day a chapter of the Gospel: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It only takes a few minutes. Under pressure to conform to the materialist worldview by which we are all unconsciously influenced, we often are tempted to create a false Jesus who fits smoothly into that world, and who validates accommodation with secular humanism. By reading the actual text of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we can encounter Jesus, the real Jesus, who shakes us out of our complacency, strips away our illusions, and calls each of us to personal conversion, and to the counter-cultural heroism of holiness.
We study the wisdom of our faith, using the gift of human reason; we do so in a spirit of prayer, in which we ask for the gift of faith. Faith itself is reasonable, though the truth which it reveals cannot be grasped by those who limit their search for truth to the use of materialist instruments that by definition are inadequate to discover a truth that goes beyond the merely material.
Faith and reason cannot ever contradict one another, and both are needed to find the fullness of truth. There is a marvelous scene at the end of “The Blue Cross”, the first and best of the Father Brown detective stories of G. K. Chesterton, in which the criminal Flambeau tries to convince Father Brown that he is a fellow priest. To do that, he attacks reason, but that reveals him to be a fraud, for as Father Brown remarks, attacking reason is bad theology, not a sign of faith.
So we should study our faith, in a spirit of prayer, using the God-given instrument of reason to learn more and more about the mysteries of faith, daily exploring the never-ending gold mine of spiritual insight.
I always recall the story of St Augustine walking on the beach, trying to find a reasonable way of examining the greatest mystery of Christian faith, the innermost reality of God in the Trinity. He sees a little boy with a seashell, running back and forth between the ocean and a little hole he has dug in the sand, trying to fill it with the ocean. Augustine says, “Little boy, you can never empty the ocean into that hole with your seashell.” And the little boy replies: and you will never grasp the mystery of the trinity with the seashell of reason. But I am sure both agreed that Augustine should keep on scooping with that useful though limited tool.
The prophetic zeal which allows us to see through the illusions of materialist secularism, and to do battle daily against the evils in society, in the Church, and in our own hearts, can so easily sour into sterile bitterness. That is another reason why a life of prayerful repentance and adoration is essential. If we recognize our own sins, we will be more charitable. If we come daily before God in adoration, we will be more conscious of God’s loving providence, in which we find the joy expressed in the verse from Psalm 100 which I chose as the motto for my ordination as a priest many years ago:
“Serve the Lord with gladness, come before him singing for joy.”