When we face suffering, it is easy to feel abandoned by God but it is then that we must cling to Faith writes Niall Guinan
This year has certainly seen its fair share of bleak moments and one of the bleakest must surely have been the RTÉ Prime Time interview with geriatrician Prof. Rónán Collins when he said that many older people are now feeling that maybe “life isn’t worth living any longer”.
It was a devastating moment that encapsulates the horrifying mental health crisis that is now afflicting the country as so many of the joys of life have been taken from us over the past six months. This is, of course, happening in a country where suicide is already rampant.
Mother
I lost my own mother to suicide in 2017 as years of difficulties and stress at work became too much for her. When we face such immense suffering, it is easy to feel abandoned by God and even to lose faith entirely. Every day I think about words in my mother’s last note to us, “I have no answers” and am reminded of the cry of Christ from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Yet our faith does provide an answer. The psalm whose opening Christ screamed in agony from the Cross is not just a psalm about apparent divine abandonment, it is a psalm about divine faithfulness. It ends with ecstatic scenes of the afflicted eating and being satisfied, with “all of the families of the nations” coming to worship before God. In the words of St John Henry Newman, God “knows what he is about” and he produces the greatest light out of the greatest darkness. When in the Book of Genesis, Joseph reveals himself to the cruel brothers who had caused him so much pain, he looks back on all that has happened and sees that “God meant it for good”. The worst event in history, the torture and murder of God Himself occurred on a day we call “Good” Friday.
Flannery O’Connor famously said that the Catholic Faith is a Cross rather than an electric blanket. The Lord asks us to take his yoke upon us even as we labour and are heavily laden. He is calling us to take yet more burdens on ourselves in addition to our everyday sufferings. But this is the great paradox: when we accept the Cross that the Lord holds out to us, all of our other burdens are transformed. Our yokes become easy and our burdens light and we find rest for our souls by offering up our sufferings through, with, and in him who is gentle and humble in heart. We see this on Calvary, when St Luke contrasts the foolish thief who mocked Christ and asked him to do magic tricks and the wise thief who, as Venerable Fulton Sheen beautifully put it, “asked to die like a thief and steal Paradise. He knocked once, sought once, asked once, dared everything and found everything.”
Wisdom
If we have the wisdom to steal Paradise, we will one day see what Dante hoped to see: “the scattered pages of the universe bound together in one volume by Love.” We will understand the great purpose that our sufferings served in God’s loving plan, the future and the hope promised to Jeremiah long ago.
If we find our faith tested in these extraordinary times, we should remember the words of St James who points out to us that God tests our faith in order to make us more steadfast in that faith so that, some day, we may be “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing”. St Peter too, who so easily could have fallen into the despair of Judas, tells us that our faith, “more precious than gold” is tested by fire that it may “redound to praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus Christ”.
My mother’s last words to me were to ask me to say the Rosary for her. How wise she was. Praying the Rosary, we learn to see our earthly joys and sorrows in the light of the eternal glory that is promised to us. In the repetition of the prayers of the Rosary, we hear the gentle heartbeat of Mary who stands by us in our sufferings as she stood by the Cross of her son. This prayer is a true crown, a “corona”, to give us hope that we will overcome the pain that this coronavirus is causing. I would invite anyone reading this to answer my mother’s request and to pray the Rosary for anyone who is in despair or suicidal or losing their faith at this time. Call on Mary, who prays for us all “now and at the hour of our death” with those wonderful titles, “Comfort of the Afflicted” and “Cause of our Joy.”
