Faith

As an undergraduate, I often memorized material that would likely appear on final examinations. Of course, as soon as I finished the exams, I forgot what I’d memorized.

---

I want my own students to avoid this practice, and mindful that experience is the best teacher, I devise methods that make them utilize learned material. This strategy works well in developing better word usage. Most college students nowadays possess limited vocabularies, and their dependence on language-destroying emailing and text-messaging communications worsens this deficiency. To improve students’ vocabularies, I provide a continuous list of words as the semester progresses, and require that they be used in compositions. Those sincerely interested in enhancing communicative skills soon realize that, just as a palette containing the complete spectrum of colors enhances the artist’s capability to imitate nature, a large vocabulary helps them do a better job of painting with words, that is, to articulate. I do the same with figures of speech, such as idioms, similes, metaphors, and analogies, all of which boost composition to a higher level of articulation. Of these, the one students use most is the analogy, which often provides a way of looking at something that may never have been considered before. Recently, I read an analogy of the Exodus that helped me to see it in a more meaningful way. I had a basic knowledge of the journey in which Moses led countless thousands of Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land, and understood that the march was fraught with hardship and perils, across arid desert regions, mountains, and the Red Sea. However, not once during my study of this epic trek did I ever consider the logistics that would have been involved. In the analogy I read, supposedly developed by the U. S. Army’s Quartermaster General, the logistics were, to say the least, mind-boggling. During the Israelites’ long journey, estimates are that Moses would have needed at least 1,500 tons of food per day just to keep his people from starving, and that since much of the journey traversed treeless wastelands, firewood for cooking and warmth at night would have amounted to around 4,000 tons a day, and they would have needed 11,000,000 million gallons of water daily. I’m not sure the numbers in this analogous recreation of the Israelites’ journey are believable, but I believe this: Moses wasn’t concerned with logistics; he knew that God would attend to his needs. He possessed what all human beings — then, now, and always — must have to complete a successful trek through mortality to the Promised land of eternal life in Heaven: faith. As we approach the most glorious time of the year and celebrate the gift God gave His children that is preeminent above all others — His Son Jesus Christ — we should strive to build within ourselves a faith as unfaltering as that of Moses. We should remember the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: “No explanation is necessary to one who has faith; no explanation is possible to one without faith.”