What I Really Learned in Faith, Reason, and Revelation

     Over the course of this past semester, I felt that I have really developed and learned a lot about my faith. Going into the class, I believed that I was extremely strong in my faith and that I did my best as a Catholic. But this course helped me realize that I was fooling myself about several things, the two most notable of which are respecting my parents and actually knowing what it means to be a Catholic.

     It first started with the Right Speech Experiment. I had tried to justify my lying to my parents with innumerable excuses, but this activity really shoved the proof in front of me; I was either doing something wrong so that I had to lie to get out of trouble, or I didn’t have enough respect for my parents to tell them the truth. Either way, it made me rethink how I spoke to others and why I would need to lie in the first place. I try to be more honest with people now and pay a certain attention to what I say instead of just spouting whatever comes to my mind. It was a very enlightening assignment and I feel that I have appreciated my family more after it.

     While I believe that learning to respect my parents more and paying attention to what I say is important, I believe that the most important thing I learned in the class was that I should not call myself a Catholic if I do not know what it means. I discovered, in the first few days of class, that my knowledge of Catholic teachings was woefully inadequate. With several of the quizzes that I was presented with, I could not recall some of the most important teachings of the Church. I specifically remember not being able to write down all the Beatitudes and consistently forgetting what Jesus said “one must do to gain eternal life.” When I thought about these facts, I asked myself, “What does this say about your devotion to Catholic teachings? For all you know there could be something you disagree with in Catholicism and you wouldn’t even know it.”
     I realized that I had been making excuses about my faith for a long time. I thought that God would “understand” if I was too busy to pay attention to Him or if I wanted to do other things rather than read or pay attention to the Bible. But the shock of being ignorant of Church teachings helped me start immersing myself in my faith again. I paid attention in class and read a number of parts of the Bible to better know what it means to be a Catholic. I realized that it is an empty claim to say that you are Catholic when you don't even know the full extent of what it means.