Have you ever felt so let down by God that you considered abstaining from the Eucharist as a form of protest, as a way of telling Him, “Fix this!” “Change them!” “Do something!”? I never thought I would get to that place, but within the last several months, that’s exactly where I found myself. This year has been extremely difficult for me. I’ve felt like I can’t catch a break or even catch my breath.
Early this year, my dad passed away after a short battle with a very aggressive lymphoma. I then lost one of my dearest friends, an amazing woman who hired me as an intern almost thirty years ago and then mentored me for many years after that. I’ve also had several potentially serious health issues surface and worsen. In addition, I was recently told that I am now completely blind in my right eye, with no hope for recovery. I’ve also experienced strains in several close relationships. It’s been the sort of year that can’t end soon enough, and it’s made me question my faith in ways I never would have thought possible.
Going to Mass became a huge struggle for me as I got stuck in a vicious cycle: going to Mass on Sunday; then getting more and more depressed and angry as Mass went on (rather than letting Jesus bring me to a place of joy and peace); then dreading going to Mass the next Sunday. It reached the point where I told my wife I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go to church anymore, or at least not for a while.
Then, over a period of several days, I began to feel that God was speaking to me very clearly through various people. This helped me begin to connect the dots between some “seeds” of spiritual wisdom that I think God planted in my heart over the previous six months — “seeds” that I hadn’t really allowed Him to nurture. When these seeds started reappearing, I discovered new things about myself and God’s love for me.
The first “seed” was planted during the first Sunday Mass after my dad’s funeral. The Gospel reading for the Fifth Sunday of Lent was about the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Something caught my attention that I had never noticed before. When we are first introduced to Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus distinguishes between Martha, who was “anxious and worried with many things” and Mary, who had “chosen the better part” — sitting at his feet (Lk 10:41-42). In the narrative of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in John’s Gospel, both Martha and Mary greet Jesus with the exact same words, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21,32). I noticed that Jesus, in response, does not chide them for a lack of faith, but comforts them and weeps with them.
The second “seed” was a sermon by the late Tim Keller, a well-known evangelical pastor. Several months ago, I came across a video of Pastor Keller on the topic, “How to deal with dark times.” His teaching focused on Psalm 88. The psalm is an absolute downer, with the psalmist venting anger and frustration at God in a very irreverent way. It ends with the line, “my only friend is darkness.” Keller asked the question, why is this particular psalm even in the Bible? His conclusion was that although it might seem to be quite disrespectful, if not blasphemous, it’s in the Bible because God wants us to know that even if we’re angry at Him, if we still choose to pray to him anyway, then the devil doesn’t win the day. Using the story of Job as an example, Keller said, “God is looking at you and saying, ‘now we’re going to figure out whether you got into the Christian faith to get Me to serve you, or in order that you would serve Me. Now we’re going to find out, because right now, you’re not going to get much out of your relationship with Me. Now we’re going to see whether you’re serving Me, or yourself, whether you’re loving Me, or yourself. And when you say ‘ok, I’m going to love you, I’m going to serve you’, it’s going to change you.’”
The third “seed” was a catechesis that Pope Francis gave during Holy Week this year, titled, “The Crucifix, well-spring of hope.” My friend Monica Pope — a long-time catechist and retreat director from the Diocese of Lansing — and WPI co-founder Paul Fahey discussed this catechesis on an episode of The Pope Francis Generation podcast. In a later conversation with her, Monica pointed out the part of the catechesis to me where the Holy Father says, “I ask myself: In what way does this help our hope? In this way, what does Jesus, naked, stripped of everything, of everything, say to my hope, how does he help me?” He then answers, “God does not hide the wounds that pierced his body and soul from our eyes. He shows them so we can see that a new passage can be opened with Easter: to make holes of lights out of our own wounds… Think about your wounds, the ones you alone know about, that everyone has hidden in their heart. And look at the Lord and you will see, you will see how holes of light come out of those wounds… And I ask you: what do you do with your wounds, with the ones only you know about? You can allow them to infect you with resentment and sadness, or instead unite them to those of Jesus, so that these wounds may become luminous too.”
The fourth “seed” was a Joel Osteen sermon, of all things, that showed up unexpectedly in my YouTube recommendations in late August. In the sermon, titled, “Leave It Alone,” Osteen talked about how there are situations in life where no amount of effort on our part is going to fix them, and that sometimes, despite our best intentions, we can even make matters worse with our attempts to solve them. A particular line stood out to me, “Sometimes it takes more faith to do nothing, than to get it all stirred up. It takes more faith to leave it alone, than to force it to happen.” He talked about the parable of the weeds among the wheat (Mt 13:24-30), saying that you can do all the right things, be faithful to God and yet still have weeds sprout up in your life that you didn’t plant. He emphasized that it’s not our job to remove the weeds. That’s up to God, and we have to trust Him to remove the weeds when He decides the time is right.
The fifth “seed” was a response I received from Monica Pope after I reached out to ask what she thought of the idea of abstaining from communion as a way of showing God how serious I am that I want things to change. In her response, Monica posed two questions to me that she felt God had asked her during a very difficult time in her own life. The first question was, “Are you able to acknowledge and feel deeply hurt, extremely frustrated, and utterly weary, without being disgusted and resentful, and without trying to fix, show, demonstrate, or instruct?” Her second question was about whether I’m willing to let Jesus transform me without expecting Him to transform an external situation or another person. She went on to explain that it’s impossible to accomplish either of these on my own, saying that “even the willingness has to come from Him.”
What lessons do I think I’m learning from these “seeds”?
The first lesson is that we can follow the Lord as best we know how, and yet still suffer, and that our suffering can go on for quite some time. We aren’t spared the trials of life just because we have chosen to follow Jesus.
The second lesson is that we can sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to him, and yet still find ourselves accusing him of letting us down when we are confronted with hard times, and that he in turn, is not indifferent to our suffering, but cries with us.
The third lesson is that our suffering does not have to be meaningless. As Pope Francis points out, our wounds can be transformed if we “unite them to those of Jesus.” Understanding this makes it easier to put into practice his advice that, “it is only if we stop thinking of ourselves that we will find ourselves again.”
This leads to the fourth lesson I’m learning, which is that we are called to radical surrender, to accept that God is sovereign and that, as was emphasized by the prophet Isaiah during the first reading at Mass a couple Sundays ago, His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways (Is 55:8). We may not understand what He’s doing, or even think He’s doing anything at all, but He knows what He’s doing, and as hard as it can be to let go, we have to trust that He knows our situation better than we do and that He is working for our good.
The fifth lesson is that we cannot get to this place of radical surrender on our own. We need Jesus to give us the desire and the strength to do it. We can’t do it without His help. So, as much as I am tempted to shake my fist at God and stay away from the Eucharist in protest, I won’t do that. I know that I need to surrender. The first step for me in doing that, is to stop trying to tell Him what to do, and instead, humbly accept the precious gift of His Body and Blood that He freely offers to me each time I go to Mass.
Photo by Daniel Dan on Unsplash
Joseph Snearline is a Catholic writer, travel consultant, and advocate for people with disabilities. He lives in Colorado’s Front Range with his wife Grace and their two kids.
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