ONLY FAITH
Author: Fr. Michael Byron April 09, 2022
Our joy and our hope and our
confidence today do not arise from anything that can be seen. Our faith does not stay firm because we can
observe a far distant light up ahead, or hear the echo of a consoling melody on
the other side of suffering. Our steady
walk into chaos, step by step, is not the result of our determination or our bravery, nor is our standing in
the enveloping darkness the sign of our strength.
Rather, it is all based on our
willingness to trust in a promise, willingly to become weak, embracing of that
which we cannot yet understand. It is to
fall into the embrace of the only power on earth that can lead us out of the
impossible human condition into which we have become trapped. It is like finding ourselves in quicksand,
having realized that our every move will only threaten to pull us farther
downward, sealing our doom even more inevitably. And for a long time that’s just exactly what
it seems to be doing.
We struggle onward not because it
seems to be the only rational thing to do, but because it does not. Faith, and only faith, strips away every
confidence, every false hope, for the sake of a promise – and nothing more.
Jesus and his followers turned
their faces toward Jerusalem on that passion day without any understanding as
to how it could possibly end well. Death
was the only likely outcome as they moved forward, and despair must have seemed
to them to be the only proper emotion – except for sadness and perhaps even a
little foolishness.
They followed in the same way all
their ancestors before them had: they followed a promise, in faith. There wasn’t anything else upon which to
cling.
And so do we follow in the same
way now, as we behold the inhumanity in Ukraine, abuse in our homes and on our
borders, violence and racism in our towns, poison in the air, addictions and
angers in our hearts, shatterings in our relationships, exclusion. Such darkness, such hopelessness, such
loneliness. And still we cling to the promise. Our Holy Week is just beginning, perhaps in
desperation and disappointment, but it has only begun. We live it yet again as they did and as all
of us ever will – possessed of our faith to accompany our tears and our
bewilderment. Have we any other choice?
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