DOUBT: Don’t Overexpect, Underexpect, But Trust

Homily at the Sion Community BELOVED retreat on Divine Mercy Sunday.

Let’s talk about doubt.

I have a confession to make. There are days in my life when I find myself wondering if it’s really true. Did Jesus actually rise from the dead? Is he in heaven right now, listening to my prayers? Are all the sacrifices involved in living as a faithful Christian, let alone as a priest, really worth it?

On days like that, I need to remind myself of a few things that I cannot doubt.

I cannot doubt that I have had moments in prayer when I have sensed God drawing close to me, though not for a long time now.

I cannot doubt that nearly 30 years ago, I surrendered my life to the Holy Spirit and experienced a new way of praying [the gift of tongues], which has remained with me ever since.

I cannot doubt that I know people who have personally experienced or received miracles of healing, though I’ve never seen God perform a visible miracle with my own eyes.

And yet I am still tempted to doubt. In fact, that’s the oldest temptation in the Bible! The Book of Genesis begins with the serpent sowing doubt – did God really say you couldn’t eat of the tree of knowledge?

Perhaps you’re struggling with similar questions. Is it really true that Jesus rose from the dead? Is it really true that he loves you and desires you to be his bride, wedded to him for eternity? Is it true that you are beautiful in his sight, that you can stand in your presence without shame, and that He longs to forgive all your sins for the asking?

We doubt because we have intellectual questions about God – if he loves us, why is the world in such a mess?

We doubt because we have mixed feelings about God – does he really love me personally when my life is such a mess?

We doubt because we’ve heard the rumours, but we can’t see the Lord of life with our own eyes – just like St Thomas during that first week after the crazy message began to circulate about Jesus rising from the dead. Like Thomas, we haven’t seen the risen Jesus. Like him, we experience a mixture of faith and doubt.

Some of us have only the experiences of others as the foundation of our faith. Perhaps we were raised in a Christian family. Or perhaps we met Christians who gave powerful testimonies of knowing God’s nearness. There are times when that hope is enough – like the people in the crowds who longed for even something as flimsy as the shade of Peter’s shadow, knowing it could bring a touch from the Divine.

There was a time in my life, 30 years ago, when I was struggling with whether to accept Jesus as Lord of my life. Could I trust him? Might he ask me to do something I didn’t want to do? I was on retreat, and I gave some time to wrestle with this. For me, the answer came through reasoning. Did I believe that God was smarter than me? Yes – so that was a strong reason to trust his judgment. Did I believe that God loved me? Everything in the Bible screamed out that I had a Father who loved me so much he sent his own Son who freely chose to die on a Cross so my sin could be forgiven. The logic was inescapable. If God loved me that much, and knew what was best for me, I could trust Him. I surrendered. I asked him to be Lord of my whole life and show me what to do after University. That wasn’t the day I got my priestly calling – in fact God led me to work in various universities for the next 5 years – but it was a key step in my journey.

For some of us, it comes in a moment of clear reason. For others, it comes in the form of an intense moment of prayer. But God will win our trust through drawing close to us somehow. Most of us won’t experience anything like St Thomas; few are blessed to see the Risen Lord with their earthly eyes. This is why the Lord reminds us: “Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

However that clarity came to us, we need to hold on to it in our darker moments. If you are familiar with C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles you might remember the terrible phrase in the later books – “Susan was no longer a friend of Narnia”. A woman who had once believed in God had let her faith slip to take on the values of the world around her, pursuing fashion and fickle friendships.

Thomas too might have fallen away; his anguish was what any one of us might cry out in a dark time – “Lord, unless I can touch you, I can’t believe you’re really there.”

Thomas got his wish.

I wonder how Thomas felt in that moment. He was carrying a mixture of fear and love, doubt and hope. He had doubted whether Jesus remembered and cared for him personally. He had doubted the testimony of his friends, that Christ was risen. But now, undeniably, Jesus had not only remembered him, but had noticed his doubt and his pain. Thomas’ reward for his loyalty was to be written into history as the one man to stand for all of us who know that same painful mixture of doubt and hope.

On this Sunday we also remember that Jesus appeared to St Faustina Kowalska in the 20th century, to show his Divine Mercy. “Paint an image of me with two rays streaming from my breast: the water of baptism and the blood of communion. On the Sunday after Easter, honour this image, saying, ‘Jesus, I trust in you.’” Trust is the antidote to doubt. To trust, we need to avoid overestimating what God would do for us, otherwise we’ll wrongly blame God for failing to do what God never promised. But equally we must not underestimate God, who often chooses to leave us in darkness for a time until we have own own “Thomas moment”, however it comes.

You won’t find promises of a trouble-free life in the Bible. You will find promises that God will walk with us through the darkness. When we say, “Jesus, I trust in you,” what we mean is: “Jesus, I will follow your commands even when times are hard; I know you walk with me through the darkness.” Thomas and the other apostles knew the darkness of facing the Death of Jesus, yet they were sent as messengers of hope to the whole world! So yes, acknowledge doubt but choose to trust. Recognise doubt. D. O. U. B. T. : Don’t Overestimate, Underestimate, But Trust. “Doubt no longer but believe.” Put your trust in your beloved, for he has already placed his trust in you.

Resources for Our Lady’s Catechists

On 23 April 2022, I addressed the national conference of Our Lady’s Catechists in Coventry, on the topic: Why I am a Catholic: The Relationship between Catechesis and Evangelisation. This blog post is a compilation of links for resources and sources mentioned in my address. The slides are available as a PPTX PowerPoint file or as a PDF.

Summaries of several of the key books I mentioned are already given in my earlier post, The Books You Need to Read.

Statistics about the current state of the Catholic Church in England & Wales (E&W) are sourced from a paper by Stephen Bullivant based on the British Social Attitude surveys up to 2014, and two posts by Ben Clements, one using the same survey data up to 2018 and another from a specially-comissioned survey of Catholics in 2019.

Divine Renovation ministries recently produced two webinars on moving from a mentality of “running courses” to asking “What promotes conversion?” – part one dealt with First Communion and part two with Confirmation.

Evangelical Tim Keller’s cultural analysis is in this video, noted by Sherry Weddell’s forum comments on 10 April 2022 (you need to apply to join the Forming Intentional Disciples Facebook forum).

What’s the Catholic Church good at right now? We are good at losing old people slowly and young people quickly. And we’re going to carry on losing young people until we learn how to turn young people into disciples. We know that young people are most likely to stay connected to church when their Dad worships regularly and when they can be part of a fellowship of other faithful young people.

Anglican research shows that having some experience, however thin, of religious community as a child was a strong predictor of whether an adult would attend a place of worship; congregations were most effective at attracting children aged under 16 when they employed a ‘Messy Church’ approach. Messy Church is “a form of church for children and adults that involves creativity, celebration and hospitality, primarily for people who don’t already belong to another form of church.” Children and adults gather together for a gathering which includes a creative activity exploring a message from the Bible, and also includes a shared meal. This is not an addition to church – for the families who take part, it is church.

This wouldn’t fit so well into a Catholic context – unless a radical priest dispensed families from Sunday Mass to do Messy Church instead – but there are innovations which can work in a Catholic context such as the Cardiff toddler Mass.

You can read the Vatican’s official notes on restructuring parishes and see the news items about one bishop being given a second diocese in Ireland with a summary of the press release about the Archbishop of Cardiff taking charge of neighbouring Menevia.

Unam Sanctam, by Pope Boniface in 1302, was insistent that no-one could enter heaven unless they submitted to the Roman Pontiff – but this could have been meant as a warning shot to the rebellious King of France at the time. Blessed Pius IX (in 1863’s Quanto Conficiamur Moerore) was more lenient, excusing those who knew nothing about the Catholic Church from any such burden! The Vatican II position is found in Lumen Gentium (§8) and, regarding members of other Christian traditions specifically, in Unitatis Redintegratio (§3).

Pope Francis’ exhortation Evangelii Gaudium declares us Missionary Disciples in §120 and summarises the basic Gospel message in §164. Note also the Church’s teaching on how evangelising is different from prosyletising.

Links for Alpha and alternative courses (including Discovering Christ from Christlife) can be found among these general resources on how to evangelise. You may also be interested in reviewing the five pillars of thriving parishes.

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Treachery

Homily for Palm Sunday, Year C, for participants in the Beginning Experience residential weekend at SENT, 10 April 2021.

A story of bereavement. A story of betrayal. The Passion of Christ brings all human sorrow to the Cross.

The Blessed Virgin Mary was asked to give her YES to becoming the mother of Christ. In this, God was also asking her – though she didn’t yet know it – to embrace the sorrow of burying her only son. The choice to say YES to love is the choice to say yes to heartbreak.

Judas Iscariot had high hopes for his friend, Jesus of Nazareth. Surely this popular teacher and healer would be the one to liberate Israel from the cruel rule of Rome? But in time, Judas felt betrayed by Jesus’ insistence on loving our enemies, and he in turn betrayed the Saviour with a kiss.

When we say yes to the adventure of marriage, we do so with high hopes of growing old together. When we ask the Church to bless a marriage, the minister pronounces a blessing of living to see one’s children’s children in a seasoned partnership with one’s spouse. 

Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way, and that is the reason we have been gathered here this weekend. And when it all goes wrong, our human instinct looks for someone to blame. Was it someone’s fault, or a failure in medical care, that my beloved died? In the case of separation, was it my fault? Or is it all HIS fault or HER fault? The time for fault-finding is when small pinches in a relationship can be named, owned and fixed. But at the foot of the Cross, when there is no way back, Jesus teaches us the words of healing: Father, forgive, for he, she, they, did not know what they were doing. Father, forgive me, for Jesus excuses me too in my brokenness.

Or perhaps it is God we want to find fault with. Why did God allow me to marry the wrong person? Why did God not prevent this untimely death? Like Christ upon the Cross, we may reach for those bitter words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Yet these words are not only the dying words of Our Lord, but also the words of a psalm, given for today’s liturgy. This psalm begins with despair but moves through renewed trust and into praise. The person who is tempted to blame God knows that God is real and God is powerful. Yet God’s true power is that of transforming shame and sorrow into grace and glory! God asked Mary to give her yes, which was a yes to the pain of the Passion and the resplendence of the Resurrection. Our Lord named Peter prince of his apostles, knowing Peter too would betray him, but would become a powerful witness to the possibility of repentance and rehabilitation. I can give you no answer to the question your heart longs to ask – “Why did God allow this?” – I only know that God did allow it and in the end we will understand how it fits into God’s plan to transform a broken world.

Perhaps you’ve suffered the failure of a marriage, and you feel shamed by the demands of the Catholic Church. Well-meaning Catholics sometimes misunderstand what the Church asks, and burden you with another Cross to carry. So I want you to hear this from the lips of a priest in the pulpit: There is no shame in walking away from an unsafe relationship where your partner refuses to take your needs seriously. There is no shame in obtaining a legal divorce when you’ve tried your best to make the relationship work and you need to manage the financial reality of being separate. And there is no shame in asking the question, “Was my marriage a binding covenant made by both of us in the way required to create a sacred and lifelong bond?” – which is the question the Catholic Church’s tribunals ask when considering an annulment.

We are all pilgrims on the journey of holiness. Today’s Mass opens with Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, surrounded by a crowd full of hope. If recent times have been a dark season, a long Lent, then know that the sun will rise again. The emblem of The Beginning Experience shows the sun rising again beyond the Cross. Easter Sunday may not be for 7 days, but every Sunday, even Palm Sunday, is a celebration or the Resurrection. For those who crucified Jesus, today is the day when we hear them receive the words, “Father, forgive!”

How can a crime so heinous be forgiven? Nothing is impossible to God. The Word of God has the power to cut the strongest bonds and enlighten the darkest places.

Forgiveness is a decision. It starts with saying the words “I forgive you.” If you can’t do that on your own, use the mighty power of God. Jesus did not say “I forgive” but “Father, forgive.” You can say “In Jesus Name, I forgive you.” Note what you are NOT saying. You’re not saying “I excuse you.” You’re not saying “That’s OK.” You are only saying, “I choose not to punish you for the hurt you have done to me.”

Letting go is also a decision. Our parents, our husbands, our wives, our children – each are given to us for a season, but ultimately they belong to God. If we are acutely aware of the absence of a loved one, we might try this prayer, which comes from St Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit Order:

Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O lord, I return it. All is Thine, dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and thy grace, for this is sufficient for me.

St Ignatius of Loyola

Jesus said “yes” to the cross, knowing it was the only way he could enter into life. He accepted death, but God raised him high. If you are willing to begin again, surrender to the God who has brought you to today. Choose to thank God for the painful gift of the past. Choose to forgive, today, and place your tomorrow into the hands of God. You will be raised up with Christ, the sun will rise again. Jesus, I trust in you.