Sister Barbara Jean Mihalchick posts videos of her reflections each week at the Facebook of the Sisters of St. Basil the Great.
View them at: https://www.facebook.com/sistersofstbasil.uniontown/.
This is a transcript of her Aug. 9, 2019 reflection and is Part 7 of her “Fruits of the Holy Spirit” series.
Glory to Jesus Christ!
As we continue this series on the fruits of the Holy Spirit, we look today at “faith.”
Last weekend, I had the joy of being with a convocation of young adults in the Eparchy of Passaic in New York City, We were challenged on Saturday afternoon to go forth into the city and to take our faith and make it known.
Well, a security guard, at one point, said to me, “Sister, say a prayer for me.”
So I went over and met him and his co-worker. Then a few minutes later, I thought, “How can I turn this into a faith moment for us all?”
I came back to Nelson and I said, “So, what’s going to be your side of this?”
And he jumped and began to think. We talked about it for a few moments.
So what is faith? It’s knowing we are of God and for God. That our life is about doing what God would have us to do.
I picked up recently again the book of Father Walter Ciszek, who spent 23 years in Soviet prisons and then several more years serving the people in the underground church in Russia.
He faced the deep questions of faith and suffered as a result of living that faith as a member of the Very Mystical Body of Christ.
I want to read a profound paragraph of his, about faith:
A person of faith is always conscious of God. Not only in his own life but in the lives of others. This is the basis of true charity; of that great Commandment by which we are instructed to love God with all our whole mind and our whole heart and our whole soul and our neighbor as ourselves.
Faith, then, is the basis for love. It is in the insight of faith that we understand the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of all people, the Mystical Body, too.
Love, Saint John writes repeatedly, is the one thing that fulfills all the Commandments and the Law. But prior to love and bolstering it at the core is faith. We must have faith before we can love. Or we will surely end up loving the wrong thing: loving ourselves more than God or loving creatures for themselves. This is the meaning of sin.
To increase our love to love properly, we must strive always to increase our faith. We do this by means of prayer and the Sacraments.
Profound thought. I encourage us to think about how we can increase our faith in these days: prayer, Sacraments and, also, reading the Holy Gospel.
God bless you.
