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Perseverance in faith 162 Faith is an entirely free gift that God makes
to man. We can lose this priceless gift, as St Paul
indicated to St Timothy: ‘Wage the good warfare,
holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting
conscience, certain persons have made shipwreck of their
2089 faith.’44 To live, grow and persevere in the
faith until the end we must nourish it with the word of God;
we must beg the Lord to 1037, 201 increase our faith;45
it must be ‘working through charity’, 2573,
284 abounding in hope, and rooted in the faith of the
Church.~6 Faith — the beginning of eternal life 163 Faith makes us taste in advance the light of
the beatific vision, io88 the goal ofourjourney here
below. Then we shall see God ‘face to face’,
‘as he is’.47 So faith is already the beginning of
eternal life: When we contemplate the
blessings of faith even now, as if gazing at a reflection
in a mirror, it is as if we already possessed the
wonderful things which our faith assures us we shall one day
enjoy.~8 164 Now, however, ‘we
walk by faith, not by sight’;49 we perceive God as
‘in a mirror, dimly’ and only ‘in
part’.5° Even though enlightened by him in whom it
believes, faith is often lived in darkness and can be put to
the test. The world we live in often 2846 seems very far
from the one promised us by faith. Our experiences of evil
and suffering, injustice and death, seem to contradict the
309, 1502 Good News; they can shake our faith and become a
temptation ioo6 against it. j6~
It is then we must turn to the witnesses offaith: to
Abraham, who ‘in hope... believed against
hope’;5’ to the Virgin Mary, ho, in ‘her
pilgrimage of faith’, walked into the ‘night of
faith’52 sharing the darkness of her son’s
suffering and death; and to so 2719 any others:
‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cud
of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin
which gs so closely, and let us run with perseverance the
race that is set U ore us, looking toJesus the pioneer
and perfecter of our faith.’53 |
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