"One of the extraordinary aspects of the teachings of Jesus is found in his telling men and women that they can rise above the vindictiveness and estrangement that fill their lives when they do not keep faith with each other. He says there are yet resources of healing and self-realization that can be called upon if a person believes deeply enough. The content of the Christian Gospel bids us always to go deeper into ourselves and our experience, to find the kingdom within ourselves, in the powers that we can draw on to achieve what St. John describes as 'life to the full.'
"That is not the power of positive thinking but the much harder task of finding and bringing the undiscovered aspects of our identities into being. Only a faith whose content recognizes and symbolizes the fact that men and women can always find fuller lives — only that faith can ever make them whole.
"Faith is intimately involved in the human story, and religious faith takes us more deeply into it rather than farther away from it. The eyes of faith permit us to see ourselves as we are — and the selves we can yet be. It is the spark that dances across these flash points of experience all the days of our lives. Faith, then, is far from a frozen set of dogmas, and it has little resemblance to wishful thinking. Faith, insofar as it organizes us and orients us to what is really happening in and around us, situates us in reality rather than in some escapist illusion about life."
