“Faith is the art of holding on to things despite your changing mood and circumstances.” (C.S. Lewis).
So many things in life change. Sometimes people wake up in the morning expecting that everything will be the same as it always was, and then things change so dramatically in their life that they cannot even recognise where their life had gone or how their life had been.
People wake up in the morning thinking that they are completely healthy, and find out in the afternoon that they are dying.
Or people wake up in the morning thinking that they will be able to buy the thing they wished to buy, and find out in the afternoon hat they have no job or no money and that it is all gone.
Or people wake up in the morning and feel completely loved, and by the afternoon they have discovered that they have been betrayed by a loved one and their life is turned completely upside down.
In other words, this life that people like me try to plan out so meticulously – is a completely unplannable exercise where anything could happen and quite often does happen.
And so, I have been thinking about what faith actually is and how faith affects how we can be and what we can do. The Christian writer, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Faith is the art of holding on to things despite your changing mood and circumstances.”
And I have come to agree with that definition of faith, because it is profound and true.
The Blessed Virgin had faith. She held onto God even when she was pregnant by a MIRACLE as a mere teenage girl. She held onto God even when she knew that her fiancé, Saint Joseph, might reject her and expose her to death by stoning for adultery. She held onto God when she needed to travel to Bethlehem, heavily pregnant with no place to stay. She held onto God when her husband woke up from a dream and decided to move their family to Egypt. She held onto God when her husband dreamed again and decided to go back home. And she held onto God when her life was poor and simple and her Son travelled away to preach. She held onto God when her Son was being led away to suffer and die for our sins.
And she did all of this while things looked ordinary. I think when we imagine the Blessed Virgin, it is very easy to imagine that the Holy Will of God was somehow spectacular to the Blessed Virgin. That somehow in her life God’s Will stood out at her as though it were covered in lights with a neon sign that said, “Do this now…” But it did not. The Will of God presented itself to the Blessed Virgin as injustice and disrespect. She did not receive a special neon sign about travelling to Bethlehem – it was an unfair law. She did not receive a special neon sign about travelling to Egypt and then back again – it was a crazy dream of her husband’s. She did not receive a special neon sign about her Son’s Passion and Death – it was a bunch of unjust judges and liars.
And it occurs to me that I receive the same sort of signs as well in my own life. I receive the injustice and the craziness and all the other stuff too. It is just that my faith is so weak that when things change, I let go… I must learn to follow the example of the Blessed Virgin, because when things changed, all she did was hold on ever more tightly – to the Holy Will of God…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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