Low Sunday 11.4.10 Faith and sorrow
My Lord and my God! We know that God can do anything He wants; that He has power to make or unmake the universe; that He has control over all that happens, even when He is permitting something against His will.
We know that He is good and loving, and looks after our best interests.
Yet somehow we still manage to doubt Him when we face a crisis of some sort. We believe all these things in principle but are likely to abandon our beliefs under pressure of circumstance.
Intellectually it is simple. God is good and wants to do good to us.
But emotionally we get tangled up very easily and fail to make progress.
What we need is a faith which combines the mental belief with the trust from the heart; so that I know God can do anything; and that what He chooses to do in this particular situation will be the best thing possible (even it is not what I would have thought of myself).
Faith has to be in God, which means more than just believing He exists, but believing in His will as being the best possible thing for me. There is a huge temptation to be disappointed in God if He does not ‘come to the party’ on a particular prayer intention.
Believing in Him must mean that I can never be disappointed in Him; there must always be some other explanation for what has failed to happen, or what has gone wrong.
We must cultivate this trust in every possible way – thanking Him for past mercies, praising Him for His goodness, discerning His will as best we can.
Thy will be done... we say it a million times, but we don’t fully mean it. We have to start meaning it and loving it as well. Learn from Jesus in the Garden; He meant it. He was not just saying a polite form of words.
We are on an adventure with God. His will unfolds before our eyes. We do not know what is going to happen next. We do not need to know. We just have to let Him take control; the less resistance we offer the better.
My Lord and my God becomes not just a metaphysical statement of belief but a statement of total trust.
St Thomas experienced a moment of realization, a quantum leap of faith. He emerged from the fog.
He was humbled at the same time. As when Peter, in the wake of the miraculous catch of fish, said first, Leave me, Lord, I am a sinful man. It was a sudden awareness of his own smallness as against God’s greatness.
We could equate the realization of our sins and a growth of faith as being part of the same movement. They both require that we are more aware of our true place before God – which is on our knees, figuratively at least.
The Divine Mercy devotion is a complete abandonment to His mercy, which is undeserved, and we have no actual claim on it apart from His goodwill towards us. In growing sensitivity to Who He is we are more ashamed of our sins and less likely to sin again.
This is the breakthrough. The miracle is not so much that God is willing to forgive but that we finally wake up to what we have done. They shall look on the one whom they have pierced and mourn for Him.
Our greatest help to having more faith is God Himself. He wants us to believe in Him, to trust in Him and to receive mercy from Him – all stages on the way to total union with Him in heaven. He will give the gift of faith to all who seek it; He will have mercy on all who ask for it.
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