I believe to understand

“I believe... that I will make it”: this is how I responded to the Director who asked me to try to write in installments a kind of explanation-commentary on the “Creed” that we recite at every Mass. It formulates in human words our assent of faith in God, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit and in the Church, in this earthly life which is also a time of preparation and expectation of eternal life. It is a faith that will not go beyond earthly life. In the eternal one we will no longer "believe" because we will "see", and everything will be different, even if no one can pretend to imagine how. In fact, "human eye has never seen, human ear has never heard, human heart has never been able to foresee what God has prepared for those who love him" (I Cor. 2, 9)
The verb “to believe”. So let's start with the word "I believe". We say it many times in our days: I think it will rain... I think it's good... I think it's not long until the train arrives... I think I remember well... I think this is right. There is also a more personal use of belief, which for example we find when addressing a person we say "I believe you", referring to something that they have communicated to us...

The beliefs. But thinking about it carefully, we realize that ultimately our whole life is made up of things that we "believe" are right to think, say, do, promise, desire, regret, hope for, etc. It is a complex of things and attitudes that affect almost everything, and if they concern something that is not only on the banal surface of our existence they can be called "beliefs", that is, realities, ideas, values ​​or behaviors to which we spontaneously adhere, to which it is natural for us to agree, and sometimes even communicate them to others...
And then there can be many "beliefs" in our lives. For them we can always also use the verb "believe", but with a meaning that goes beyond the daily occurrences, which we have seen above. Society scholars over the centuries have called them "beliefs" and they are those beliefs that produce particular attitudes in people's minds and actions. Let's think about those beliefs from which certain social practices originate, sometimes even generically religious ones, but not only, and at the basis of which are traditional customs, personal or group beliefs which precisely produce behaviors that are transmitted over time. Every people has its "beliefs", and one could say every family, even every person, solid or inconsistent, reasonable or absurd, contradictory or balanced, and so on.
But it should be noted that in all these uses the verb "believe" is put together with something else, it needs a specification that concretely gives a meaning to the verb, and does not change the meaning of the speaker's life, but only circumstances and concrete attitudes, therefore it does not have the maximum value, the one that gives an ultimate meaning to all of life. Only “faith” does this.
Faith. Here we are at a different level, where we find another use of the verb believe, affirmative or negative, but without specifications. If we hear "I believe" or "I don't believe", it is a different sense, and that "believe", used absolutely, is radically different.
“I believe”, then…For us it is the expression of “faith”, our Christian and Catholic faith in that assent that others gave for us at the moment of our Baptism, which we then reiterated in our Confirmation, which we repeat at every Eucharistic celebration and that comes to our lips, or to our mind, or to our heart in the decisive moments of our lives. A faith that then changes meaning, or rather - and we will see this little by little - finds itself giving meaning to everything that we not only do, that we hope, that we wait for, but that we are, and also to what we will be.
It is the faith expressed in our "Creed", which comes from the Jewish-Christian revelation, and which over the centuries has been transmitted as a bond that unites the Church of Christ. For this reason, a divergence of faith - real faith, obviously, not questionable things in Christian freedom - produces the rupture of the Church itself, and is called "heresy", which precisely means "laceration" of a single body, "separation" of what must remain united.
And in parallel there is also another absolute use of the verb believe. When you say “I don't believe it!” we want to affirm the absence of faith in God, and in general, that is, precisely of that faith that we affirm present when we say "I believe". But then, to better understand the essence of the question we must go back to the source from which came the announcement that for us has expressed our faith over the centuries, the Jewish-Christian faith, and how it manifested itself and manifests itself today in the Catholic Church.
It will therefore be time to open the Bible, a name which in Greek means "the Book", or "the Books", and which for us contains what we today call the "First Testament" - once called "Old", still a legitimate name , but also “Old”, with a sort of placement in the past and decrease in value, which it was better to start avoiding… and the “Second Testament” (which we also call “New”). To use a term that brings everything together we will say "Scripture", a very frequent term in the Bible itself, therefore it is not an invention of modern times, used by Jesus himself and then by Paul in many biblical passages.
The biblical faith, then, of the "Two Testaments", is the point of arrival of this first meeting, and will be the broader and more explicit starting point of the second.
A first starting point to conclude here: in the "First Testament", and therefore in the Hebrew language, faith is expressed by two verbal forms: "Batàh" and "Aman". The first form, "batàh", indicates a reality on which one can rely very solidly, a "certainty" of project on which to build everything that can follow from it, the rock of security for the whole of life, in its essential and ultimate meaning: absolute solidity and stability forever, without failure, without risk of disappointment...
Faith in the God of Abraham, Moses and the prophets who governed the entire story of the Chosen People, and who in the coming of the Messiah gives definitive basis to the plan of the Promise, of the Covenant signed forever, in a form that will never end...
There is also the second form, however, expressed by the verb "Amàn" - the one that makes us say "Amen" - and indicates a different reality of the person, who is in movement, in an impulse of trust that makes one walk forward, in the "security" felt and professed towards the One to whom one entrusts oneself in the present, in the future and forever.
Solidity in the Batàh, impetus in the Haman: the God revealed in the Covenant of Sinai and the Temple, and then given in the incarnation of the Son, is both a rock of fidelity on which to build the history of the people and the life of each one, and a refuge maternal-paternal in the difficulties of the earthly existence of each of his "children", called, saved, defended, and finally glorified...
When I say "I believe" it is on that God, revealed and given, that I base my life, and it is to that God, revealed and given, that the impetus of my whole person goes. And the affirmation itself is a grace from him, a free gift on his part, and freely accepted on my part... An "Amen" is good here. Until next time.