How do you find faith?

Faith is a journey. In some cases, it's short, in others long, and in others still, with a destination that's visible but never reached. The only certainty on this mysterious and fascinating journey is the compass: doubt. A lucid doubt, but restless and tormented. St. Paul writes in his Second Letter to the Corinthians: "The intellect is restless when faced with faith." And here's an excerpt from the chapter from the book Live lightly (Mondadori edition) in which Antonio Galdo talks about doubt as a necessary step towards arriving at reason.

HOW TO FIND FAITH

I Jesuits They changed my life. After thirteen years of attending their school, from first grade to third year of classical high school, I graduated. agnostic and revolutionary, devoid of any interest in the sacred and fueled by the fever of protest. After high school, for a few years, I never set foot in church again, and meanwhile I joined a university collective redder than fire. We felt, poor wretches, like the masters of an entire faculty, ready to surround overly strict professors with threatening eyes during exams, and in hindsight I allow myself only one mitigating factor: I was classified as a Menshevik, that is, a moderate revolutionary. One of those whom the Bolshevik comrade Lenin, in the Russia of the October Revolution, would have sent to the wall.

ALSO READ: We've launched a newsletter to collect the best Non sprecare content. To subscribe, just click here.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING FAITH

When I rediscovered my lost faith In the classrooms of a religious school, I became a regular visitor to Villa Malta, the Jesuit headquarters in Rome, where the editorial offices of Civiltà Cattolica are still located. I used to visit Giovanni, the priest who married my parents and then married me and baptized my first daughter. A friend of the family, an authority in the Jesuit universe, endowed with extraordinary theological competence, so much so that at Civiltà Cattolica he dealt, among other things, with the reports of the Vatican synods, approved in final reading personally by the Pope. Giovanni, despite the weight of his body and his head, despite his coming and going from the Pope's study in the Vatican, was endowed with a Mediterranean lightness, sunny, with a frank and ironic simplicity in answering any question, even the toughest, or in offering advice on how one feels in the world. Especially in the guise of a parent, a husband, a friend, a life partner.

One day I decided to confront the man I had chosen as my new confessor and belated tutor, and I asked him the following question: "Excuse me, Giovanni, there's something I've never been able to understand. I studied with you Jesuits for thirteen years, but by the end of school I had no religious certainty and no desire to go to Mass. A disaster. Your fault or my fault?"And he: "You have to give yourself the answer through your conscience and your discernment. As for us, as you know, the Jesuits have a centuries-old tradition of good educators, and I don't think you'll be able to ruin our reputation. Rather, you should have understood the first thing we teach, to everyone. It's the doubt, the ability to cultivate it, knowing that that plant will then be able to bear much fruit over time. Here, we are sowers of doubt...".

DOUBTS TO FIND FAITH

That word, doubt, has since then entered my head like a nail, firmly planted in the wall where I hang the keys to a light life. I understood that I should never let go of that word, and as I grew older, it became increasingly clear to me how much it matters in living with «maximum freedom and maximum responsibility" (another lesson from the Jesuits), and above all to avoid being trapped in our certainties. To avoid raising walls against human relationships, against someone different from you or exactly the same as you, against knowledge, against Curiosity, even to the possibility of changing one's mind, acknowledging that the previous one was wrong. Or at least it didn't work.

For centuries, giants of philosophy have linked any search for truth, and wisdom itself, to the veryexercise of doubt, a kind of mental gymnastics, like a push-up to tone the body. For Descartes, doubt must be cultivated as an infallible method, even if tiring, to gradually arrive at the truth which is never relative but can always be updated or integrated. Michel de Montaigne, instead, compared doubt to the image of a doorway to enter the earthly Eden of true freedom: of choice, of judgment, of opinion. Where human critical thinking, not to be confused with mistrust, is stimulated precisely by the exercise of doubt: hence the increased opportunity we have to fully enjoy the beauty of life, as free men and women, with all its nuances.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI AND FAITH

Giacomo Leopardi, who was able to combine the most tormented poetic synthesis with a very lucid philosophical reflection, wrote a praise of doubt which needs no further comment: "Our reason absolutely cannot find the truth except by doubting. He who doubts knows, and knows the most that can be known." More recently, we are in the twentieth century bloodied by two world wars in succession, the Welsh philosopher Bertrand Russell, faced with the triumph of violence and the eclipse of reason, pointed out that the world, when it is upside down—and I would say we have been more than upside down for some time—always faces the same problem. The stupid and the fanatics display their certainty about themselves and their thoughts, while the voices of the wisest, always ready to deal with doubt, are silenced.

Never before has it been more important to cultivate the exercise of doubt than in the epochal change we are experiencing. And to be wary, both in public and private life, of anyone who claims to have the truth in their pocket, like a handkerchief to blow their nose. The compass of doubt It's invaluable for avoiding the temptation to metabolize everything through stereotypes, and to surrender to fear, if not outright rejection, of the roundness of life and the more complex problems that, in one way or another, confront us every day. Complexity cannot be reduced to flashes of simplification, shortcuts that convey the illusion of a solution to the problem, but in reality complicate it. Instead, the more we doubt, the more we have the opportunity to know, to delve deeper, to to see a light in the darkness, and to arrive at the right solution. The more we become attached to doubt, the more we are able to listen to others, to not get caught up in the autism of our own opinions, to not consider ourselves infallible, omniscient. To have a sense of limits, which is a contagious narcissism Nihilism has been removed from our mental framework. Doubt is so powerful in its energy that it can coexist, and even alternate, with its opposite, religious faith. And it can bring us closer to faith, as the Jesuit Giovanni Caprile explained to me.

FAMOUS QUOTES ABOUT FAITH

• «Science is incapable of explaining life; only faith can provide us with the meaning of existence: I am happy to be a Christian." Guglielmo Marconi

The clarity and the honesty The scientist's intellectual challenge when faced with the objective limits of knowledge. Science can improve many things in our lives, but it cannot give us definitive answers to the questions of meaning—the ones that matter most in existence. Where do we come from? Are we the offspring of a species' evolution or a divine plan? And where are we going? What awaits us next? It is in this borderland that reason embraces faith and allows it to emerge. To the joy, as Marconi says, of those who manage to grasp it.

• "The heart, not the reason, feels God: this is what faith is."Blaise Pascal

Anyone who has read a few pages of the Gospel immediately understands what the French theologian meant. The message of Jesus, the son of God, is imbued with love, even for sinful man. Faith cannot exist without a lifestyle that excludes hatred and instead has plenty of energy made of attention and love. empathy for the Other. Whoever they may be, and especially when they appear to be less fortunate than us.

• "The fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love." Mother Teresa of Calcutta

With this concept, the most famous nun in modern Christianity reiterates the close relationship between faith and love. As if faith were a kind of highway, a fast lane for loving one's neighbor. As God loved his faithful. But faith—this is the new element introduced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta—is more easily reached through spirituality, the rigor of prayer. An area in which, unfortunately, modern Christians have lost several points compared to, for example, Muslims, who are capable of praying more often and more intensely.

• "Where it is doubtful that I bring faith" San Francesco d'Assisi

This passage from a beautiful prayer of St. Francis (which also says: Where there is discord, let me bring unity.) summarizes, in the words of a saint, the saint par excellence, how doubt is a gateway, to be opened slowly, to faith. Too many certainties lead to fundamentalism and, sooner or later, distance one from the mystery of faith.

• "The difficult thing is not to die for the faith, but to live for it." William Makepeace Thackeray

In centuries past, dying for one's faith was considered an honor. And it raised little doubt. Today, many things have changed, and faith no longer means risking one's life for a transcendent idea. However, the second part of the great English writer's consideration remains: how difficult it is to live for one's faith. To respect it, honor it, acknowledge it.

"I have many doubts too. Faith is not an abstract thing." Pope Francesco

If he says so Pope, and with such strength, we can trust.

PRECIOUS PARADIGMS FOR LIVING SERENELY

• How to make a couple last
• Why it pays to be polite
• How to Save a Marriage and Make It Last