I'd say that's pretty much in line with what I believe, as well. Although there are a multitude of factors acting on us constantly which are ultimately out of our control, we can still at times (though not always) choose what action we want to take.
But that language may even be too strong; it's more like we can try our best to point ourselves in the right direction and hope that over time it makes us better and strengthens our will. Maybe think of it like captaining a sailboat: we're subject to the wind and the waves and the tides and the currents. We can make slight adjustments to the sails, but that's really all we have control over; everything else is out of our hands. All we can really do is try our best to move in the general direction of whatever port we've chosen.
This is what the Catechism says about our freedom:
1731 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility. By free will one shapes one's own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.
1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.
1733 The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to "the slavery of sin."28
1734 Freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary. Progress in virtue, knowledge of the good, and ascesis enhance the mastery of the will over its acts.
1735 Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors.
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So, the way that I use the term "faith" is to describe the small portion of ourselves which we can control - the will. To combine what the Catechism says with my sailboat analogy, while we do not have control over most of the factors that influence where the boat goes, the one thing we can control is which port we're aiming at, and there are really only two ports: good and evil. And while there will be times when a storm comes and the direction we're sailing is totally out of our control, as long as we still have the desire to go to the good port, that's really all that matters.
God fully recognizes that most of what happens to us is out of our control, and it's virtually impossible for us to determine how much any given person is choosing something freely. All we need to do is desire the good - and if we can't even manage that, as long as we desire to desire the good, God will be able to help us.
That's what faith is. It's desiring to desire the good, for its own sake. It's trying our best to point the miniscule amount of control we have over ourselves in the right direction.
Thanks for the explanation.
So this leads me back to the question I asked before: Would you ever put faith in something you didn't believe in? Or, would you ever not put faith in something you do believe in? They seem to be hand in glove.
Your description, on one hand, paints faith as a desire, but desires aren't really, directly, under our control. The question becomes how one responds to a desire.
Your sailboat analogy, on the other hand, paints the picture a little differently, of faith as intention. But I'd never intend to do something if I didn't want to on some level. This gets complicated because we can have competing desires, of course.
At a certain point, I think describing what's happening here as "free will" becomes something of a misnomer. We are obliged to believe that which we're convinced is true, by definition. And if we actually believe something, it seems inevitable that we will intend to act in a way that comports with that belief. How could we not?