Often I've thought of introducing someone to the faith in the same way that I would introduce her to some academic topic. Yet in thinking that way I forget that the essence of faith is not believing in facts, even facts about God, but about coming into a relationship with God. The Holy Father expresses this point in the following way:
"One does not really know a person if one knows about this person secondhandedly. To proclaim God is to introduce to the relation with God: to teach how to pray. Prayer is faith in action. And only by experiencing life with God does the evidence of His existence appear" ("The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love").
Along the same lines he says the following in The Process of Spiritual Growth:
Never begin with thinking alone. For if you try to pull God toward you in the laboratory of rational thought, and to attach him to you in what is to some extent a purely theoretical fashion, you find you can't do it. You always have to combine the questions with action. Pascal once said to an unbelieving friend: "Start by doing what believers do, even if it still makes no sense to you." You can never look for faith in isolation; it is only found in an encounter with people who believe, who can understand you, who have perhaps come by way of a similar situation themselves, who can in some way lead you and help you. It is always among us that faith grows. Anyone who wants to go it alone has thus got it wrong from the very start.
Carlos J. Medina
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