Faith creates being, that is, acknowledgment turns potency to actuality. We are not real unless we believe. Believe the Lord is in us. It has been said by all who believe that we are created by God. Let it be said also that you are not real unless you believe. If you are in doubt, or turned away from the light of faith, His Face, you only seem to be. As we have learned in our era, though Parmenides showed us long ago, most of the world most of the time is mere semblance. By being in relationship with the real, one becomes real oneself. This relationship is one of faith. Faith is not of this world. The world is now deconstructing. Deconstruction is not nihilism, a philosophy of nothingness, as existentialism was, with its question propadeutic to philosophizing, to be or not to be, the question of suicide in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence. No, deconstruction is not a philosophy of nothingness, as with Sartre, or of being, as with Heidegger, but of sheer semblance, glamour, the milieu of Nietzsche. The opposition of being and nothingness has been deconstructed and with it faith, which must be in either the fullness or the emptiness of God. There is now only a faithless seeming-to-be, the time of opinion, of interpretation, of perspectives, of a world in which there are no longer not only values of high and long standing, but not even mere facts. There is no actuality. With too much going on, there is no action, but the pose of glamour, the system of artificiality, in which the natural is valued only for its effectiveness as a sales tool. We desire, we attend, we are interested in, that which we love. Which can now only be represented, not presented. There is no present, no presence, only presentations. There is no longer

direct unmediated contact with life. In fact, the mass of men and women are not real. They have simply ceased to exist, though they still seem to. The only way back to being is the act of faith, a will to believe in God, the really real. At the moment you say yes to God you begin to be. Without that you never even were. There are only two ways, the world of reality and the world of opinion. As one once said: do not seem but be. When you believe you come to stand. Only by standing can you understand. Then you arrive. The highest reality transcends both metaphysics and ethics. It is a moral and spiritual reality. To be in relationship with the Spirit is to be real. Everything else is material to be bought or sold. As Christ said, you must be born again, that is, being in the world does not make you real, but being in relationship with God. It has been said that each of us has their own reality. That is true for versions of semblance, of which the number is indefinite. To be definite, to be free, to be real, is to be of one mind, the mind of Christ. Only by keeping Christ in mind can you lose the separate reality of the show and find the one true good and beautiful. It is as Parmenides and Paul said, perfect. We are required then in all seriousness to be perfect, to have the mind of Christ, to be real, to love reality no matter how painful, preferring it to the intoxicants, that is, to be nothing for show. In this world that seems to be impossible. But semblance is in error. The one truth simply is the Lord Jesus Christ. This will never change. The City of God is what Augustine called the real world that I here declare, opposed to the glittering vices of the pagan diabolical city of semblance. Rilke said “you must change.” I second him and add: You have a choice. You must choose. Choose reality. Faith is the meaning of being. At the mass the priest stated the position of faith: God does the impossible. Now, for reason the impossible by definition cannot be done. Yet, the Church has ever taught, on the basis of the authority of Christ, that for God, and for one who has faith, nothing is impossible. Faith, then, understands more than cool reason comprehends. When Hegel said the real is rational and the rational is real, he attempted to rationalize faith’s basic character of higher realization through irrationality, into a system in which the sublation of difference and contradiction as absolute knowledge can be the all in all. Hegel also said the whole is the true, but

others have posited infinities, supplements and traces that exceed the whole, thus exceeding truth. Truth, to be true, would have to include the lie, or seeming-to-be. But this cannot be. They do not change the truth through that displacement. They can, as one has said, deny or ignore the truth, but they cannot change it. Truth to be true cannot be an historical process but is immutable. Human history is a lie, spoken against the truth. The Church is able through faith to have both the truth and all its contradictoriness, by mystery, by the assertion of the dogmas of God as both three and one, of Christ as both God and man, of the death of God on the cross, of a church both sinful and holy, of a sacrament both bread and God, of God both immanent and transcendent, of a human being who was completely free from sin, of a papacy which is infallible, of the good of suffering, and much else. The Church boldly asserts the incomprehensible, things which are not mere paradoxes of the faith, but real contradictions that the logic of Aristotle cannot admit, though he said Heraclitus said such things without really thinking them. I have at various points in the scope of my Transubstantiation said and shown the truth of contradiction without contradicting the truth, yet He was contradicted as prophesied by those who put him to death, even with the cross of human reason. But Truth lives again. Resurrection itself, without which our religion is to be pitied, is perhaps the greatest contradiction, though some say such things as the virgin birth to be. Anyone who clings to reason will find a stone of offense to stumble on in scripture and the church’s teaching. And yet, while asserting the necessity of both faith and reason, the Church presents us with impossibilities to believe. God asks nothing but the impossible. Be perfect. Your faith has saved you, do not sin again. The Church gives us models of perfection in the saints, who by the grace of God did the impossible. It is said the great thing is to dream the impossible dream, and one has said the only thing worth attempting is the impossible. Faith does this. But without Christ we can do nothing. Knowledge will fail, but love will go on. We love each other despite our contradictions. By faith and love we suspend the judgments of reason, transforming even the critical faith by which we are reformed for an ever-greater truth we know by love and not by reason. My life has been one love, no blot it out,

my life has been one chain of contradictions. But they are one and the same. We are presented with something greater than we can understand, but we believe, we love, we obey, and even not despite but because of the contradictions. These of the faith that the Church presents to us are the greatest spur to and test of our faith, and thus our faith is proved. Logic had its scapegoat, the scandal of the contradiction, yet faith has won out. “Being” doesn’t empty faith, but is substantial subsistent faith. Michael Bolerjack