We ask for, and receive, the gift of faith at our baptism. We receive the grace to know Christ — not to know him as we know George Washington or Martin Luther, but as I know my parents and my sisters and my wife and my children. This is the substance of our faith: to enter into a relationship with Jesus, with the God-made-man who is not an abstraction but is as real as the faces gathered around our dining-room table at Thanksgiving.