HERE’S something you don’t see everyday.
It was around 9:30 one night and I was hurrying to the Varsitarian office to put this issue to bed when I saw two people before a closed Santisimo Rosario parish entrance. One, a woman, was hanging onto the grills, her face buried in the back of her hands. And the other, a man, stood beside her. My first reaction was a quiet, awed though simple “What faith!”
Then the man suddenly and literally fell to his knees and started sobbing loudly.
“They’re in great pain, “ a friend said.
“Yes.” Then taking into consideration the fact that there is a hospital nearby, I added, “Somebody died.”
“Or somebody is dying.”
“Whatever,” a second companion, a seminarian, butted in. “Dealing with those I have not learned in the Central Seminary. That’s something for which our training is good for nothing. Good luck to the Catholic Church.”
It was not so much his deadpan that caught me off-guard, it was the truth in his words. It’s Easter, feast of feasts, memorial of Christ’s resurrection and triumph over death, and here are two people grieving. How do you preach God and the kingdom to these persons? Merely saying God is great and merciful will not bring back the dead.
***
At Easter last year, I wrote about the challenge to the Church to bring God and the transcendent order into contact with reality. But how does and how can God relate in a more intimate way than just being the referent in sentences like “He will help you in your time of grief because he is merciful”? Where is he? In heaven. So how does he help? He has his own way. When? In his own time.
How does that help? Man, unfortunately is a being of sense. He sees, tastes, hears, touches, smells. God is something we cannot sense. And so with the supernatural, that is, everything beyond the natural, of which we are part, we are totally blind.
Faith is blind. Faith in God is blind.
***
But it is precisely because of the blindness of faith that makes me consider believers strong. In the face of adversity, some people display such magnificent valor because of their faith, something which right now I believe I will never have.
The man and woman weeping at the door of the parish were not weak at all because they wept; they were strong because they went knocking on God’s door, believing that there really is a God who would grant whatever it was they were asking for if they knocked hard and loud enough. People in distress ironically affirm their belief in God’s existence even as they ask where he is. They call therefore not upon the representative stone and wooden statues but upon the represented, not upon glazed, painted eyes but upon an all-seeing one, invisible but felt by a sense only firm believers have.
Where is this secret sense, I wonder. For now, it is knowledge that gives me courage. Courage and certainty because of faith is still out of my grasp. Faith right now only brings me hope. And courage because of hope is still weak.
***
May everyone have a happy and meaningful Easter season.
