This is the first of a series of commentaries on the Summary of Catolic Faith, based on my child’s primary education pamphlet named “Resumen de la Fe Católica”
This small book containts 142 statements, that in a splendid way, I will say, summarized the Catholic faith.
My commentaries on these statements are only reflections and might not state my sincere “belief” or “faith”, which is subject to change. A true Christian would never change his/her belief under any circumstances, like torture, crisis, extreme pain or distress, but my experience of myself is that I can believe something in one moment, but after reflecting or getting more information about a certain event, see things in a different light. For instance, i have experienced once, that I could sense that something particular had happened to a person on another continent without having been in contact for some months. This is something that is totally against my belief about what is possible, so after a while I tend to change my opinion about my own experience and dismiss the claim in the end. This leads me to be sceptic in the first place when i hear any “magical” explanation about anything. Anyway, I still think faith plays an important role and I regard my own faith to fall into some sort of Christianity, but only because Christian faith is what I´ve been taught and still enjoy studying.
So, back to the topic, the first statement in the book, freely translated to English is:
“Can humans get to know God?
Yes, Humans can get to know God, the beginning and end of all things”
This is really a helpful answer, because when entering the church, which is the community of Christians, what you do is to assume that you can have a personal relationship with the creator of all things. This assumption helps you a lot, because any doubt about this would be an obstacle in searching an answer to the follow up question of this; how on earth can I get to know such a being? God is often pictures as a father of all things, so to reflect on this would be to ask yourself if having doubt about who your father is would help you to know your father? Of course not. To know your parent, you must trust that the one you deal with is your custody/parent. You must simply trust that the person you want to know sees you as his/her child and responsibility. So, if God is the creator, the beginning and end, the will behind and the origin of all existence, we must trust that this entity see all beings, including us humans, as its children. Human’s are capable to reflect on this. We are the only beings on earth that can have a relationship with God. No other creatures are evolved to relate to something outside their own world, so we can place ourselves in special position, and take the “parent” role for all other creatures.
Another way to see this statement is to acknowledge that knowing God is desirable. Getting to know God will improve us as human beings. This is not obvious, and we can actually question this based on the story about Adam and Eve in Genesis. Eating the prohibited fruit would give the humans insight into right and wrong, something reserved for devine beings. We’re not supposed to be like God. So, it seems like getting to know God is a path on the way back to paradise, where we had eternal life. Going this path seems to guide us towards having both knowledge of God and eternal life, and hence break the spell once given us and maybe become some sort of eternal living beings.
This leads us to the question about what kind of improvement we as Christians are supposed to look for. Is it global health and wellbeing, or individual moral virtue? These are often colliding values, and we really need to reflect on this before going further and leaving behind all doubts.
Luckily, the church has an entry and an exit, we can go into the church, leave this question behind us, but we can also go out to do our daily sceptical thinking. But the moment we enter the church, we should relax, and submit to the idea that, yes we can have a relationship with God. and this relationship is desirable, it will make us grow as human beings.
