Readings of the day: Isaiah 29:17-24; Psalm 27:1, 4, 13-14; Matthew 9:27-31
This season of Advent is especially about waiting for and trusting in the Lord, but have anyone here ever found this trusting in and waiting for God difficult?
Maintaining one’s faith and trust in God is challenging when we
experience God as most distant; when we experience declining health or
disability; when we experience or know others who experience grinding poverty
or unemployment; when we experience a kind of spiritual darkness or desert in
which our prayer gives us no immediate indication of how God is acting in our
lives or how we are called to act to please God.
Today’s readings hearken back to situations of deep despair, when it was
most difficult in the experiences of Biblical times to have faith and trust in
God. And yet precisely from the depths of despair, the “doom and darkness” of
which our first reading from Isaiah speaks, we are invited to trust that God is
working in the favour of the most afflicted: “The lowly will ever find joy in
the LORD, and the poor rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.”
These “lowly”
and “poor” yet faithful people are represented by the two blind men in today’s
Gospel reading. Indeed, Jesus allows them to see again, but even before this
miraculous moment they see with the eyes of faith and trust in God. Only so is
Jesus able to say, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.”
How great it
would be for us to see with the eyes of such deep faith! But most if not all of
us have experienced times when having faith and trusting in God are difficult.
For these times, I share with you a prayer from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton
that I find particularly beautiful. Thomas Merton prays, and so I invite us to
pray together, for strength of faith and trust in our loving God:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I
am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it
will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am
following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe
that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that
desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from
that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I
may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are
ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
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