Why Faith?

People can live decent lives without being religious. Anyone can follow the Ten Commandments. A person can get along and get by without seeing a higher purpose in life.

But living by the Natural Law (i.e. basic universal morality) without faith is okay if you only want to get along and get by.

The human heart, however, needs more than sheer morality to live by.

Morality is necessary in this life. It is necessary to the soul. But it's not all the soul needs.

The human heart longs for the source of happiness. To finally reach a point where one is perfectly content, without prospect of losing that happiness, and without having to strive to keep it.

And much of our lives is more or less spent in trying to find that state of happiness, even if we call it something else. We call this "pursuit of happiness", service to others, self-realization, meditation and so forth.

These pursuits can only partially answer that desire for ultimate self-fulfillment.

Without going in too deeply in to the apologetics, I would say that Faith is THE answer to this quest.

Faith is not belief without reason, although it transcends reason (but it doesn't contradict it). Faith is not belief without grounding (although it can be without human proof).

Faith is a relationship with God, accepting his Word on the conclusion that he is Truth, he does not lie, nor can he be deceived. Therefore what he says is true, and what he tells us is for our own ultimate happiness.

Our own reason can discover the laws of morality, albeit many people would have difficulty doing this. It's not something you undertake on your own-- it's a collective undertaking.

But our reason cannot satisfy our heart. At some point, there is a desire for something outside of ourselves, a desire to be, as I said, perfectly at rest, united with the thing that will give us this serenity.

Reason can't do the job.

God, on the other hand, is the very thing we seek. Because he represents all the things that make us perfectly content: Truth, Beauty, Love, Justice, Mercy, Life, and so forth.

God knows what we need. What we need is HIM. We can be decent enough without him-- but that would not make us happy. What makes us happy is loving him and being loved by him.

This is the starting point of Faith. That he knows everything, he made us and loves us.

When we understand this, that is when we can have faith.

And this is when we can start the journey, from merely wanting to "get along" in life, to transcend the mundane realities, many of which keep us from our heart's true desire, and raise us to a spirit of beatitude.

And that, ultimately is what Faith is about.