This past weekend we celebrated the Feast of the Holy Trinity.  It is a special feast, because it is the one in which we celebrate who our God that we worship is.  This is the center of our faith that we believe in: One God who is three persons.  We also profess this as part of our faith every week in the Nicene Creed.  Over the next few weeks, I would like to take a deeper look line-by-line of the Creed to dive deeper into what we believe.  In fact, the first words we speak with the creed is “I believe.”  What does this mean when we say it?

Before we proclaim the statements of faith that we indeed believe, we must first contemplate simply what it means to believe.  In life, we all search for meaning.  We go out searching for it.  Something that we can believe in and build a foundation on.  The amazing thing about this search is that we are searching for God.  The answer to all of our questions, the void we feel at times in ourselves, or the endless search for happiness.  It all comes together for the deep desire of our heart to discover God.  We know this because God created us and constantly calls us to Himself, for God is the source and end goal of us seeking happiness.  The reason we get lost and go astray is sometimes we do not realize God is the source of happiness or the answer to our questions.  We may not know how to look.

Where do we look in order to discover God and the beginnings of our belief?  First, we look at our world.  God created the world, so from looking at it we can come to know the Creator.  Looking at the order and beauty and looking at the movement and contingency, we can come to realize God is the beginning and the end.  It is an ability to look at the world and realize that random does not create.  Life is not an accident. 

We can also look at ourselves to discover God, because we are the only thing in creation created in God’s image and likeness.  In looking at our own soul, we can see into eternity and the origin of ourselves in God.  Our rational minds can ascend to reasonable reality that God exists.  He is the first cause and the final end of all things.  As our minds ascend to this knowledge, we begin to enter into belief and are prepared to be open to what our God will reveal to us.

If you would like to go deeper into the beginnings of our beliefs and what it means to believe, I encourage you to look up St. Thomas Aquinas’s 5 Proofs of the existence of God. The 5 Proofs look at the rational evidence for the existence of God that we can understand through our mind.  This prepares us for the faith that God will reveal to us through is interaction with creation culminating in the Incarnation.  Belief is not believing in something without evidence.  Belief is the string that links faith and reason together.