The Beauty of the Faith

God. He’s amazing! He’s majestic; He’s perfect; He’s mysterious; He’s above us. He tells us so in Isaiah 55, where it’s written, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” We can study. We can pray. We can try to be kind and good and love our neighbor. But no matter how hard we work, no matter how hard we try, He will always be a mystery we can never really quite grasp.

That’s one of the things I love about Him, and it’s one of the reasons I love my Faith.

You see, to me, the mystery of Catholicism–the fact that it’s just too much to ever really fully understand–the fact that we could study it all our lives, line every wall of our homes with bookshelves full of good Catholic books, actually read them, and still never really “get” it all–that’s just one more facet of Catholicism that reflects God’s heart so well that this millennia-old Faith could have only been crafted by God Himself. Catholicism is a perfectly mysterious reflection of a perfectly mysterious God–a God who lets us understand only as much as He deems good for us. A God who leaves the parts hidden that we couldn’t handle yet. A God we can never completely understand and whose love for us is beyond our reason.

So–God’s majesty–His mystery-the way He stays above us–those are things that always speak to me of His beauty and, because the Catholic Faith reflects that element of Him so well, they speak to me, too, of the fact that Catholicism is a wonderful gift from Him. The beautiful mystery of this Faith is like the wrapping paper He put around it when He gave it to us–both to hide the contents and to be His signature. To prove it’s from Him.

But there’s something else, too, that speaks to me of Catholicism being truth. And that’s the opposite quality–the humility of it. God reaches down to us in whatever simple way we will understand…knowing that we are incapable of reaching all the way up to Him. He does it every single day, for all of us, in the Eucharist. Can you imagine–the greatest King ever known, actually hiding His glory so that we can look upon Him without being harmed by the sheer power of it? Can you imagine the One Who, with one word, calmed the seas– coming to us every single day under the appearance of common bread and wine so that even the poorest of the poor can share in His life? Wow.

Only Christ, with His heart for us, could come up with that! The humility of it all–it speaks so well of the humility of Christ Himself. It couldn’t come from anyone but Him…and we have it right there, in John 6: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” Catholicism–both majesty AND humility!…or, in other words, Isaiah 55 and John 6, all wrapped up in one simple–yet incomprehensible–gift! Thank You, Lord!

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