Faith is the knowledge born from love

That sentence is borrowed from the Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan. Another great thinker, Hans Urs von Balthasar, spoke of faith as like the first smile of an infant, which usually does not happen until into the second month. It is a perfect image of being "born from love" because the smile could not happen if the baby did not receive love. Long before verbal communication, the first smile is expressing something like: "I recognize that I am loved". And that is the core of religious faith.

Here is the simplest definition of faith that I can imagine: it is a yes to a yes. God says "yes" to us in Christ. It is total and steady. And we say a more unsteady "yes" back - unsteady because we do not see God in this life and because our experience of faith can suffer from all the ups and downs of our human journey.

That meeting of yes with yes has two sides. From us it needs a certain readiness, a recognizing attitude. When Jesus said that unless you become as a child, you will not enter the Kingdom, he was pointing to this level of disposition. The other side is God's, so to speak. Faith is not just about the existence of God but about who God is for us, or better, who God wants to be for us. It's about a relationship, a gift. God's desire is to have a relationship with us - called faith.

Adapted from Questions of Faith (Veritas Publications, Dublin, 1996).