When was the Gift of Faith Given to Me?

Since Faith is an act that comprehends all the dimensions of our existence, it also requires constantly renewed reflection and witness. The question “when was the gift of faith been given to me?” brings us to the very chief point of our faith—God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Here, we must not presuppose faith, but instead we need to propose it. We need to propose it in three (3) conditions which allows us to go directly to the very core of the question that has been raised.

First, we need to know that faith is already given to us upon our existence. “Man has the desire for God” (cf. CCC, part 1, section 1, a. 2, p. 19). Faith is a supremely personal act and it is an orientation of our existence as a whole. It is a fundamental option that affects every domain of our existence. That we could say that faith is not merely intellectual, or merely volitional, or merely emotional activity—it is all of these things together. It is an act of the whole self of the whole person in his concentrated unity to God.

Second, we are “handed over” to faith into the Word that precedes us through an immersion in water, symbolizing death—baptism. Baptism as a symbolic death that links this renewal to death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. It reminds us that what takes place in the act of faith is the destruction and renewal of the self. Hence, thru baptism, our faith has been marked, to concretize our faith, and it is a mere perishing of the mere self and precisely a resurrection of the true self.

Finally, Faith is recognized when a person has already a sense of true awareness and when a person has already reached and stepped into the age of reason. This means that the cognitional process is a process of assimilation, a vital process, which is a way of the person to realize such things. That the “we”, the “what”, the “how” of faith belongs together. This brings us into the light of faith, which includes a style of humanity that they do not produce by themselves, but which they gradually learn by plunging into their baptismal existence.

Faith is already innate in us that which it has already given by God to us in the very recesses of our existence. It is already incorporated in our existence. Moreover, faith can be actualized and can be concretized thru baptism, which the baptism opens us up into a new dimension, from death of our self into the resurrection of our new self, that allows us to accept the gift of the Spirit. Furthermore, this can only be realized, the act of faith, when a person has already the awareness and has the capacity to reason in order for them to understand their faith. Thus, the faith allows us to understand and to unfold us the truth, which dwells the very Truth of our Faith. (Angelo C. Espinas)