What Is Faith, Actually?
- Jun 8
- 4 min read
What Is Faith, Actually?
Okay, so here's a question that sounds really simple but actually isn't: what is faith?
You've probably heard that word a bajillion times. It gets thrown around constantly: in church, in conversation, online. But I genuinely think faith is one of the most misunderstood words in all of religion. Because most of the time when people talk about faith, they mean something like this: when you come up against something in religion that seems illogical or doesn't quite make sense, you just... shut up and accept it. You have faith because your parents told you to, or your priest did, or the Bible says so.
But here's the thing: that is not what the Catholic Church actually means by faith.
That version of faith, blind faith, has a name. It's called fideism. And it's the idea that religious belief doesn't need any logical reason or evidence behind it. It's purely blind. And it's a position the Catholic Church actively rejects.
So what does faith actually mean? Let me tell you a story.
Saint Augustine and the Tiny Angel
Saint Augustine was a fifth-century philosopher, theologian, and general all-round legend. (If you've never looked him up, please do. He's awesome.) So, Augustine was writing a book about the Holy Trinity and really wrestling with it. How can there be three persons in one God? He understood it logically, more or less, but he was trying to fully grasp the totality of the mystery and find a way to perfectly articulate it.
And he was basically thinking, "Okay, I'm a very intelligent person. I've thought hard about lots of things. I can nail this. If I just think hard enough, I can figure out the Trinity."
So he went for a walk on the beach to mull it over.
The beach was empty except for one little kid playing in the sand. Augustine went over to see what he was doing, and this boy had dug a hole in the ground. He had a shell, and he kept running back and forth, over to the ocean, filling the shell with water, then pouring it into the hole.
Augustine looked at him and said, "What are you doing with that hole?"
And the kid looked up and said, "Oh, I'm going to fit the whole ocean into it."
Augustine laughed. "Mate, there is absolutely no way that's going to happen. You cannot fit the entire ocean into a hole in the ground."
The kid stopped. Looked him dead in the eye. And said: "Exactly. And in the same way, you will never fit the whole Trinity in your head."
And then he disappeared.
I love this story so much. It's like a tiny badass angel came down from heaven purely to give Saint Augustine a reality check.
What the Story Actually Tells Us
The story illuminates two really important things about what faith is.
First: there are some truths and mysteries of faith that are simply too big to fit inside our heads. Just like the whole ocean can't fit into a hole in the ground, the infinite mystery of God can't fit inside our finite material minds.
And actually, when you think about it, this makes complete sense. If there is a God -- a God who transcends material reality, who created the universe, who created me and my mind, and who exists outside of and infinitely above everything -- then it's not only understandable but logically required that there would be things about that infinite God that don't fit neatly inside our heads. Because if we could fully fit God in our heads, we'd have heads like God.
So yes, there will be things where we have to say, "There's an element of mystery here, and I can't fully grasp it, and that's okay."
But -- and this is the second thing, and it's really important -- just because we can't fit the entire mystery into our heads, that doesn't mean we can't fit any of it in.
Look at the little boy. He can't fit the whole ocean into his hole in the ground. But he can fit some of it in. And that matters.
Faith isn't like a square peg being rammed into a round hole, as if the truths of religion are completely incompatible with human reason and we just have to blindly accept them because they make no sense whatsoever. No. It's more like pouring water. Some of it pours in. Then it fills up and overflows, because there's too much for that little hole to contain. But enough gets in that you can work with it.
That's the key. In order to have faith, we need a basic level of understanding and logical grounding that does fit inside our heads -- enough to be able to say, "Okay, I understand this to a significant extent. And now I can trust in the rest that remains a mystery."
Faith Is Not Blind. It's a Reasonable Trust
So that's what faith actually is. Not blind belief, or gullibility, or wearing blinkers and accepting whatever we're told.
Faith is a reasonable trust, grounded in and supported by reason and evidence.
And one more thing worth saying about the ocean metaphor: yes, maybe we can't fit the ocean into a hole in the ground. But we can dive into that ocean and swim around in its infinite depths for as long as we like.
The same is true of our faith. When it comes to the mysteries, there is nothing stopping us from exploring them, wrestling with them, thinking about them, and splashing around in them for our whole lives. It's not "here's how much fits in your head, now stop thinking, stop questioning." If something remains a mystery and you want to know more, keep exploring. That's not a problem. That's kind of the whole point.
This is the first in a series on Catholic teaching. Next up: we'll look at how faith actually works as a personal, embodied, lived experience, because knowing what faith is and actually having it are two very different things.
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