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Lumen Fidei - Day 1 - June 9, 2014

I think it is easy to see why people worshipped the sun. Its power is awesome. Everything that lives (almost everything) relies on it. It wouldn’t take long to see that a plant with not sunlight would shrivel and die. You can physically feel the warmth on your face and should be in awe of it, even if we know it is a ball of fire billions of miles away. But in a quick few words, early Christians put it into perspective. "No one — Saint Justin Martyr writes — has ever been ready to die for his faith in the sun". How many died for the light that was given to them through Christ, the growth of the early Church was watered by the blood of the martyrs. Even today, actions against personal interest for the faith are what will evangelize far more than the words we speak.

There are those that still look for “light” in sources that are not God. There are many that look specifically in any place but God because the world has been convinced God is an old fashioned myth and a waste of time. “In modernity, that light might have been considered sufficient for societies of old, but was felt to be of no use for new times”. As Pope Francis describes Nietzsche, he would say that belief in this light actually blocks a person from seeking the truth and true light that will liberate humanity. As the world tried to put reason and faith side by side, faith was seen as the filler for everything that could not be proved by reason. But this road grew less and less satisfying and lead to the pushing of faith out of the conversation completely.

But without light, you become blind. You cannot walk a straight path, you cannot tell the right way from the wrong, and you lose sight of the end and just stumble from one thing to another without any sense of direction or goal. That is where the world goes when the light of Faith is removed, when God is taken out. It moves from one project to the next, right or wrong doesn’t matter, direction doesn’t matter, and effect doesn’t matter. The world is lost because it wants to stumble in the dark and refuses to turn on the light.

“The light of faith is unique, since it is capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence.” I love this line. And it can only come from God. The further we move away from faith in the world, the darker it gets and only the light of faith in God can shed the light we need to begin walking in the right direction.