Catholicism, holiness and spirituality

Not just in the church...

The Catholic church has had so much attention in the past decade for how it mishandled sexual abuse that we don't often hear much about sexual abuse in other organizations and institutions. This morning I read an AP story about sexual abuse in public schools. And in the past I've read about cases in other Christian churches, the Boy Scouts, and so on. Most all of them seem to have a few things in common - the perpetrators are good at hiding themselves and their actions, and supervisors often cover-up or minimize the abuse to save-face for their organization.

It's a sad situation, to see abuse so pervasive in the world.

Imperfect, but Sufficient

Faith the size of a mustard seed... The upright person lives by their faithfulness... Our faith is precious... These are the lines from today's scripture readings that stick with me. Perhaps the one that left me thinking more than the others was when the apostles asked Jesus to increase their faith. Who among us wouldn't also ask Jesus to increase our faith?

The apostles were faced with some pretty daunting work, and increase in faith, from their perspective, would be a great help. These days we see and read about people who have shown great faith, and we wish we had the same. It's natural, but it also takes attention away from the work in our own faith. If we only had the faith of Mother Theresa, St Ignatius, or Joe down the street (or Suzy on my blog list) then our spiritual troubles would surely be solved. Or so it seems.

Could it be that we already have all the faith we need? Maybe it's all there just waiting for us to uncover it, to become familiar with it, to explore the depths of it. Our faith isn't perfect, but that's part of the human condition. We're not really different from the apostles who asked for their faith to be increased; we're in good company:

Mark the apostles: they would never have left everything they possessed and spurned worldly ambition to follow the Lord unless their faith had been great; and yet that faith of theirs could not have been perfect, otherwise they would hot have asked the Lord to increase it.

St Augustine of Hippo

So our faith isn't perfect; what in our life is perfect? I'm tending to believe that the faith we do have is sufficient. God has equipped us with what we need, and so perhaps it's up to us to find it and draw on it as we need to in answering God's call in our lives.