10/2/2022 - 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time

The size and shape of Faith
As you read this, I am miles away in India visiting my mother who turned 101 years old a month ago. Please say a prayer as she comes to the final lap of her life’s journey. You are all in my prayers. The Scripture readings of this weekend are a tapestry of life situations: pain, silence of God, faith, and courage. One of the persons who best exemplified courage in face of whirlwind of problems is our own New Yorker up for canonization, Dorothy Day. In her autobiography entitled ‘The Long Loneliness’ she writes, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

Once she was asked by a young social worker who was disillusioned by the enormous challenge of working with needy people, “Miss Day, I worked at one of your houses for just a few months. The needs of the people you serve were so great. They had so many problems. I did not know where to start. How do you do this day in, day out?” Dorothy Day did not directly answer her question. She just smiled and began a story. A woman all alone in the world lost her brother. He died of cancer still young. She kept asking God, “Why?”  (How similar to our first reading from Prophet Habakkuk) But hearing only silence, she set out in search of an answer.

She had not gone far when she came upon an old man sitting on a bench. He was weeping. He said, “I have suffered a great loss. I am a painter and I have lost my eyesight.” He, too, was seeking an answer to the question “Why?” The woman invited him to join her and taking him by the arm, they trudged down the road. Soon they overtook a young man walking down the road aimlessly. The source of all his joy, his wife, had left him for another man. So, he joined in the search of an answer to the “Why?” question. Shortly they came upon a young mother weeping on her front doorstep. She had lost her child and she, too, joined them. But nowhere could they find an answer. 

Suddenly, they came upon Jesus Christ, and each confronted Him with their questions.  But Jesus gave no answer.  Instead, He began to cry and said, “I am bearing the burden of a woman who lost her brother, a girl whose baby has died, a painter who has lost his eyesight and a young man who has lost his wife to another.” As He spoke the four moved closer and they embraced each other, and they grasped Jesus’ hands. Jesus spoke again saying, “My dominion is the dominion of the heart. I cannot prevent pain. I can only heal it.” “How?” asked the woman.  “By sharing it”, He said.  Then He was gone. The four were left standing and holding each other.

What theology tells us, and our faith confirms is that in bad times, as well as, in good, in sickness and in health, in death as in life, God is there. St. Pope John Paul II, in 1981 on his visit to the memorial in Hiroshima's Peace Park, close to the epicenter of the blast that took 70,000 lives, began his address by saying, “At this place God wept.” The biblical account of God always pictures a God who is close to the human heart and shares our joys and pains. This God is a God of Love. A God who loves you individually. A God who loves you even if you cannot understand how a loving God can let this or that happen to you. For all our intellectual sweat, we have not solved the problem of evil. “Why not”, because our minds, however brilliant, are too small to grasp God. This is why we all need a deepening of our faith, an unshakeable trust that good will result from our worst experiences, as everything is permitted and known by a God who seeks only the best for us.

“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?” Dorothy Day

Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O.