"We have to have the courage to explain faith."A little over a month ago, Tracey Rowland, jurist, philosopher, theologian and one of only four women to be awarded the Ratzinger Prize for Theology, encouraged, in this medium to "to have the courage to explain the faith". These words were not exactly a toast to the sun.
Explaining the faith is not just "talking" about the faith, nor even doing it in the name of the faith; nor is it simply repeating creedal formulas.
Explaining faith presupposes knowing and loving it. For love is a necessary form of knowledge in our relationship with God. It is not for nothing that, in the words of Benedict XVI "We have believed in God's loveThe Christian can thus express the fundamental choice of his life".
Surely you, like me, have heard more than once that "you cannot love what you do not know" and, at the same time, knowledge broadens the gaze of love. To know God in order to love him more; to love God in order to know who he is.
This is the only way to avoid being left with an image of God as a kind of super Santa Claus to whom we ask for things and who brings them to us leaving a trail of jelly beans. No. That chubby, kind and good-natured old man, who smells of sweets, is not God. Even if he is kind (or rather, if he is Love), and we also need to put heart and feeling into our life as Christians, the sentimentalization of faith is perhaps one of the most common traps of our eternally "teenager" society.
As Ulrich L. Lehner points out in his book God is not cool: "I have found that a good deal of parish life is centered on sentimentality, or the search for feelings. Children are invited to 'feel' and 'experience' this or that, but rarely are they given a content, a reason for their faith. I am not surprised that they leave the Church if they can find better feelings outside it."
Feelings obviously have their place in faith, but they must be supported by a content so that the tears that may come to our eyes when contemplating scenes of Christ's passion, for example, do not end up drowning the gift of faith in a meaningless sea; just as we cannot live a faith reduced to a stoic and intellectual attitude that would end up forgetting the key to this same faith: the incarnation of that same Love: God who becomes man, indeed, perfect man.
The commitment to get our faith back on track is today an unavoidable demand that encompasses practically all areas of our lives: from religious education in school, to the life of faith in the family, to the danger of erasing God from our culture, reducing our culture to a simple succession of unimportant events.
Believe it or not, today more than ever, the "altar to the unknown god" stands at the center of our squares and it is up to us to name it and give it life, to make our faith deeper, to be disciples and witnesses in a deaf world. And also to accept with humility that, probably, we will not be thanked.
Editor-in-Chief at Omnes. Degree in Communication, with more than 15 years of experience in Church communication. She has collaborated in media such as COPE or RNE.
