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June 2, 2009 Back in the year 2000, I was fortunate enough to learn from a priest. From my local catholic church, Father Ben was fresh out of seminary school and he wanted to “regurgitate” what he learned, so he taught a class that he called “What is Faith”, and twelve lucky parishioners, including myself, took part. It was three hours per class, tests and all, every Thursday evening from seven to ten. For six months, Thursday nights never came too soon. Looking back, I don’t think I ever looked forward to attending any class as much as Father Ben’s. His “engineering” background made his explanations very interesting. He was a mechanical engineering graduate before he found his calling. As soon as the classes ended, I was asked to teach Confirmation for the church’s youth ministry. I taught for five years until 2005. One of the topics I learned, and used to teach was the difference between faith and religion. Simply put, faith is man’s “response” to God’s revelation, and religion is the “shape and substance” of that response. So faith, love, hope, belief, trust…all are basically the same “response”. All the rituals, and everything we do to respond, is religion. I used to talk to the kids about birthdays, and many later told me that this clarified a lot. You love someone, it’s their birthday, and everything you do to “show” the love is religion. The card, the party, the cake, the food, the birthday song, and so on…are all religion. I used to tell them that we Catholics have the biggest birthday parties! Simply saying “I love you” is never enough. The proof is in the religion. The important thing was that you can’t have faith without religion. A one way relationship is no relationship at all. The big word is “relationship”. Father Ben’s favorite word was relationship. It’s the key word. In one of my earlier Confirmation lessons, it quickly occurred to me that faith applied to everything. It was definitely a major revelation. You have to have faith in God. You have to have faith in the church. You also have to have faith in science. You have to have faith in education, faith in the government, faith in the economy, faith in your car, faith in your stove, faith in your refrigerator, faith in your computer, faith in you cell phone, faith in your vitamins, faith in your cold milk, and so on and so on and so on. Growing up, I used to think that faith only existed between me and God, and my religion, but Father Ben’s “What is Faith” class changed all that. I’ve always, always wondered…how do we really know that dinosaurs looked like that? What if they were all hairy, like a monkey? How do we really know what’s beyond Pluto? Could there maybe be more planets we just haven’t discovered? What’s the current status of Pluto anyway? Maybe socialism is better than free enterprise? I’ve read many Richard Rohr books. In some of them, he talks about the fact that democracy and free enterprise isn’t necessarily the best system for any country. It’s just a system. With what’s going on now economically, should we maybe look into a better system? I once met a guy who told me about a “benevolent dictator”. I have to google that one. Apparently he ruled in Indonesia and was loved by everyone, and he never got rich! A benevolent dictator. Sounds promising. It also sounds like small government to me! Remember when we had faith in George W. Bush? And to be fair, Mr. Bill Clinton? Does it really matter if Obama is black? All I know is that I have faith in him, and if he screws up, that’s on him! Everything boils down to faith. I used to be a real estate broker, and selling low-start adjustable mortgage loans was my forte. It was all a revelation to me back in the mid nineties, when I got trained by banks such as Great Western Bank and Home Savings Bank and Washington Mutual Bank, and so on. I was in the whirlwind of all the bank mergers of the nineties. These adjustable loans once saved the banks, back in the early eighties, when the fixed rates were in the teens. Now they’re looked at as the cause of the banking industries’ downfall. I’m really curious to know what happens in the next five to ten years. Times are tough, and getting even tougher. All I know is that I do not plan to lose faith. I’ve lost a lot. A lot!
But I’m keeping
the faith.
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