Virtue Quest

Building a habit of faith

It’s easy to see how faith is a theological virtue; but I think there is also a natural virtue of faith. It is the habit of believing or trusting in anyone’s ability to do any good.

I bring this up because I sometimes get depressed about my own failures or, more accurately, my not living up to my own expectations. I think, “By this time, I should be making six figures” or “Why haven’t I found Miss Right?” or “Holy crap, am I still living with my parents?”

When I’m in such a mood, it’s hard to trust anyone else. I reject compliments. I turn all Scrooge-and-Grinch-like. I get into arguments way too easily.

Faith and trust

It’s hard to trust others when I feel like I can’t trust myself. When I cease believing in my own ability to do good – or even to do any better than I have in the past – then I lose any basis for believing that anyone else can do good either.

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that any experience of others I have is based on my own past experience; so, if I only have experience of disappointment, then I don’t really know how to believe or hope for something good.

The second reason is that I myself am the standard that I measure the world against. Sound kind of egotistical, but I think it’s just the nature of being a subject, of having a first-person perspective. So I look at others and I compare what I see of them to how I feel inside myself and then extrapolate to how that other person must feel or think or whatever.

So, if I’m feeling like a disappointment in myself, like I’m untrustworthy, then I don’t really remember those times when I actually fulfilled a trust placed in me, and I can only see people around me as better than me or the same as me.

Envy and lack of faith

When I see people as the same as me, or even as worse than me, it’s easy to understand why I don’t trust them. They’re even less trustworthy than I am!

But those I see as better than me, because I see them acting in good and noble ways, I tend to regard with envy. I tell myself that they’ve received some benefit, some gift or ability that has been denied to me. I envy them, and don’t trust them because of spite.

And I think that’s the ultimate problem I have in practicing natural faith: I keep referring to myself as the standard. But faith requires me to open up and let other people be other than I am – to let them be themselves. And to trust that they really can be themselves without conforming to my standard for myself. Moreover, to trust that they might have some insight into the world, even into me, that I don’t have.

Faith means remembering that the world does not revolve around me.

Theological faith

The gift of faith, as the Christian tradition articulates it, forms the basis for relating to God as a person. But it is not all that different from the natural virtue I’ve been describing. As Thomas Aquinas says somewhere, “Grace builds on nature.” (Anyone know where he says that? I admit I don’t know!)

Faith is the foundation of any personal relationship: trusting another to be him- or herself. And trusting that they also trust me to be myself: just one person among billions … yet still unique.