The Evidence of Things

What is faith?

I remember being asked this many years ago. I was in a cigar lounge (as you do), and deep, global problem-solving conversations were occurring (as one is wont to do when tobacco and libations are poured). Naturally the topic of God came up, and with it, faith.

What is faith?

The question hung in the air along with the long, lazy tendrils of tobacco smoke. I grew a coy grin and quickly rattled off St. Paul’s definition in Hebrews: “Faith is the evidence of things not seen and the reality of things hoped for.” I sat back and silently patted myself on the back.

Checkmate.

“What does that mean?”

I instantly deflated.

It was a fair question. I had given the right answer, but I hadn’t given a real one. I could quote the line, but I didn’t understand it. For years, that bothered me—until I realized that faith isn’t an idea you explain. It’s a relationship you remember.

Faith as Memory

We tend to think of faith as looking forward—believing in something that hasn’t yet happened. But in truth, faith is anchored in the past. It’s trust built on memory.

When Israel wandered through the desert, God didn’t ask them to trust blindly. He told them to remember:

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt.”

Before He called them to new obedience, He reminded them of past deliverance. Every covenant, every altar, every psalm of thanksgiving was a record of His reliability. Faith was never meant to float in abstraction—it was to rest on the sturdy ground of memory.

We believe God will keep His promises tomorrow because He has already kept them yesterday.

It’s the same way trust works in any real relationship. When a husband asks his wife to do something difficult, she doesn’t pause to evaluate every possible outcome; she acts because she knows his heart. She remembers the years of quiet faithfulness—every promise kept, every burden shared—and that memory becomes her assurance. Her “yes” in the present rests upon the evidence of the past.

Faith, then, is not wishful thinking; it’s relational memory. It’s knowing who has spoken before, and trusting that voice again.

Over the days, weeks, and years of building this relationship, you begin to trust your spouse—namely, that they are going to do what they say they are going to do. However, marriage, and indeed every relationship, is marred by an ugly truth: humans fail.

Humans fail, and so faith is known as a theological virtue, not an anthropological one. For this very reason: when faith is placed in God, it never fails.

When He speaks, He fulfills.
When He promises, He accomplishes.
When He leads, He never abandons.

Human trust is always a risk.
Faith in God is never a gamble.

The history of His actions—stretching from Abraham to Christ to the smallest moments of grace in our own lives—is the evidence that supports the unseen and sustains the hoped-for.

Anamnesis: When the Past Becomes Present

If faith is rooted in remembering what God has done, then the Eucharist is the highest expression of faith. For in the Mass, the Church does not simply recall Christ’s sacrifice—she enters it.

This is the meaning of anamnesis, a word that appears in every Eucharistic Prayer. It does not mean “memory” in the modern, psychological sense. It means a sacred remembrance that makes the past present and effective now.

The Catechism teaches:

“In the sense of Sacred Scripture, the memorial is not merely the recollection of past events but the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men. In the liturgical celebration, these events become in a certain way present and real.”
—CCC 1363

This is staggering.

The central act of Christian worship is God teaching us how to remember.

At every Mass, we do not merely think about Calvary—
we participate in the once-for-all sacrifice Christ made.
The past is not left behind; it is opened to us.

This is why Jesus said:

“Do this in remembrance of me.”

Not because He worried we would forget an important detail,
but because faith draws its strength from the memory of God’s deeds,
and the Eucharist is the Church’s living memory.

The Catechism confirms this:

“The Eucharist is thus a memorial in the sense that it makes present and actual the sacrifice Christ offered once for all on the cross.”
—CCC 1364

Here, faith meets its perfect home.

Faith believes because God has acted in history;
anamnesis lets us stand within that very history again.

In this way, faith is not nostalgia for a distant past,
but a continual entering into what God has already accomplished—
a past that lives, moves, and transforms the present.

Suffering, Memory, and the Cross

Viktor Frankl famously wrote:

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’”

He learned this in the crucible of the camps, where survival depended not on predicting the future but on remembering a meaning already given—a love already known. It was memory that sustained him when nothing else could.

Christian faith understands this even more deeply.
For us, the why is not an idea;
it is a Person.

And the reason suffering has dignity at all—the reason the “how” can be borne—is because Christ has borne it first. He entered human suffering, filled it with His presence, and transformed it from the inside.

Our suffering is not dignified because we are strong.
It is dignified because He suffered.

This is where anamnesis becomes not only theological but existential.

In every Mass, the Church does not merely think about Christ’s suffering; she stands within it. The sacrifice of Calvary is made present, and the love that once redeemed the world becomes the love that sustains us now.

Frankl survived the camps by remembering a love that had once been real.
We endure our trials by entering the love that is always real,
always present,
always offered.

Through anamnesis, Christ’s “why” becomes our own:

He suffered out of love for us—
and so we can bear the “how” of our own suffering with Him.

Faith is not naïve optimism or blind courage.
It is the steady conviction that the One who endured the Cross is the same One who walks with us now—
and that the past we remember in faith is the very past made present in the Eucharist.

This is why faith matters.
This is why memory matters.
And this is why our suffering, however small or great, is never meaningless:
because it belongs to the story of the God who has already saved us.