I. Fullness of Faith

From the Series: Beneath the Standard of Mary – The Heart and Voice of an Auxiliary Member written by James Dacey, Jr. OFS

Fullness of faith is not what most people think it is.

It is not confidence or optimism. It is not the feeling you get on a good Sunday morning when the music is right, and the homily lands perfectly, and everything in your life seems to be cooperating with God’s plan for you. Don’t get me wrong, that is beautiful, but that is not fullness of faith.

Fullness of faith is letting go of everything, knowing you have lost nothing.

Read that again slowly and let it settle in your heart.

It means you can walk through this life with virtually nothing in your hands, nothing guaranteed, nothing secured by the world’s standards, and still be completely, utterly fine. Not because you are numb or you have given up. But because every corner of your heart is so occupied by faith that there is simply no room left for despair to move in and set up and stay.

The Legion of Mary prayer, the great prayer of the Tessera that Legionaries around the world have been praying for over a century, asks God for exactly this. It asks for a fullness of faith in Him and a trust in Our Lady, to which it is given to conquer the world. Not to endure the world, or to survive the world, but to conquer it. That is an astonishing thing to ask for. And the only way that prayer makes any sense at all is if fullness of faith is exactly what I described, a total, complete, interior surrender that the world simply cannot reach.

Because the world will try. Let there be no mistake about that.

The storms will come. They always do. Relationships fracture. Health fails. People you love are taken before you are ready. Financial security, which you worked and prayed and sacrificed for, can be gone in a season. The people standing next to you in the pews, people you thought were immovable, sometimes walk away from the faith entirely. And in the middle of all of that, God does not always answer the way you asked Him to. He does not always answer on your timeline. Sometimes He seems to be completely silent.

And here is where fullness of faith separates itself from everything else.

My faith is not gauged by what I want or what I feel in a given moment. It has never been. I talk to Jesus every day, real conversations, not just formal prayers. I talk to His mother the same way. I know in my heart that they hear me. I know it the way you know anything that is deeply, personally true, not because I can prove it in an argument, but because the relationship is real. And because the relationship is real, I understand something that took me years to learn Jesus does not answer every prayer the way I frame it, because if He did, He would simply be handing me my own limited vision dressed up in supernatural packaging. He gives me what He knows I need, when He knows I need it, in the form that will actually do something good for my soul.

That is not a passive faith. That is the most active kind there is.

Fullness of faith means carrying your faith into every room you enter. Not preaching it at people, believe me, nobody wants that, and frankly, it rarely works anyway. But living it so visibly, so consistently, so naturally, that the people around you simply know. They know without you announcing it. They see it in the way you handle a crisis. They see it in the way you treat a stranger. They see it in the fact that when everything is falling apart, you are not falling apart with it. And eventually, without any sermon from you, they find themselves asking: How does he do that? What does she have that I don’t?

That question is an open door. And faith, real fullness of faith, is what keeps you ready to walk through it with them.

The Tessera prayer calls this faith firm and immovable as a rock. That phrase is not meant to be poetic. It is a description of a spiritual state that is genuinely available to every one of us, but it does not come automatically, and it does not come cheaply. It comes through a relationship. Through daily prayer. Through the Rosary that roots you, day after day, in the mysteries of Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Through returning to Our Lady again and again, not because you are weak, but because you are wise enough to know that she forms you into something better than you could form yourself.

I will say this plainly: none of us are perfect. I heard a speaker recently make this point as directly as you could,  in front of everyone. He asked his audience, if God held us to His law right now, without mercy, without the grace we are living in, who among us would go to heaven? A few hands went up. Someone pointed at the speaker and said, “You would.” He shook his head. No, he said. Not me. Not any of us. We are all sinners. Every last one. Fullness of faith does not mean fullness of perfection. It means fullness of love, love that God sees, love that He responds to, love that He measures not by our track record, but by what is actually happening on the inside of us.

He knows if we know Him. He knows if we love Him. It does not matter what we perform on the outside. He is looking at the interior. Saint Bridget of Sweden understood this with a clarity that still cuts through centuries. What God wants from us is not our resumé, or bank statement or really anything from this world; Jesus simply wants our hearts fully and completely.

So, give Him your heart. Every broken, imperfect piece of it.

That is fullness of faith.

And beneath the standard of Mary, it is more than enough to conquer the world.

Much More to come (17 Essays Total)