Brothers, please reach into your pocket and pull out your rosary. For those of you who don’t have a rosary in your pocket, why not? When we entered our order, we made a promise to ourselves in the silence of our heart, to carry it with us always and pray it as often as we can.
When we pray the rosary, we open with the Apostle’s Creed and then an Our Father, followed by three Hail Mary’s. For an increase in Faith, Hope and Charity. I wanted to talk a little about Faith tonight. I was thinking about my faith and how it is fundamental to everything that we do. I have heard of faith referred to as pillar of our believe system, but I don’t really think that this does it justice.
I would offer an example to you. In the Gospel of Mathew, Chapter 17 versus 20-21, Jesus says, “Amen, I say to you, if you have the faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move; and nothing is impossible for you.”
Wow. I am always in awe of this statement from Jesus. Recall the disciples had just tried to drive a demon out of a little boy and they could not, but Jesus rebuked him and the demon came out of him. The disciples ask Jesus why they could not drive out the demon, and that is his reply. The first thing I asked was, how big is a mustard seed? It turns out that it is about 1-2 mm or about 0.1” maximum.
Okay, all of this is nice, but we pray and we attend church and we go to adoration and we give to charities and to the Church, why do we need to hear about faith? So let’s do a little demonstration. Assume that this board is you. The goal that you want is something that for our sake is much smaller than a mountain. Let’s say that it is this coin. And all we want to do is move this coin. We will put it on one end of the board and we will pile all of your good works, your charity, you alms giving, your weekly mass attendance, your daily prayers and all the rosaries that you are praying on the other end. Heck we will put all of the good works of all of the Knights in the room on the other end of the board. We can ask the whole Parish to jump on the end of the board and we can put all their good intentions on the end of the board.
Will we move the coin?
We might jiggle it a little from the vibration of all of this stuff, but we won’t really move the coin with our board. If we want to move the coin, we have to turn our board into a lever. A lever needs a fulcrum. A point about which our board can pivot. This is what our faith is. Our faith is a the fulcrum in our lives through which the lever of the Lord can work. All our prayers and actions can push on that lever, but if the fulcrum is not there nothing happens. If the fulcrum is small, we see an effect, but not as much as we hoped.
Now, deepen your faith through reading the Bible, through daily prayer, through adoration, through regular use of confession, through attending mass often, through works of Charity, and you increase the size of your fulcrum. Now look at what you can do with your lever!
Let me take this a little further. We all know how a lever works. You place the fulcrum near what you want to move and you move away from it to get leverage. The further the fulcrum is from you, the easier it is to move the thing you want. Think about this for a moment. If your ask is stuff near to you, the fulcrum is close you and you lose all the leverage, but if the things you are asking for are for others, away from you, you will have leverage with your faith.
Cambridge University Press has a definition for fulcrum as “the point at which a bar, or something that is balancing, is supported or balances”. The balancing point. Our Faith as the balancing point of our lives, as the fulcrum of our needs and our wants. I found it interesting that an alternate definition of fulcrum from Oxford languages as, “a thing that plays a central or essential role in an activity, event or situation.” Wow, does that define faith for us.
So, the next time that you are praying the rosary and you come to the three beads at beginning and you are praying for an increase in Faith, Hope and Charity. Keep in mind Jesus’ words to his disciples about faith the size of mustard seed and how much leverage you can have in your life if your increase your faith.