By John Cooper
Guest Column
“Dear John,
Hello. My life is a mess. One of my children is hooked on drugs. Another has two little children and is going through a divorce. A third won’t even speak to me, still hurt by something she believes I did years ago. On top of all this, my mom just got diagnosed with cancer, and she’s going to need me even more. And to make matters worse, I think my job is being eliminated. All of this makes me want to give up on faith in God! How do I keep my faith?”
The letter you just read is a fictional one based on the real correspondence I get from the people we serve through St. Anthony Parish’s ministries in Davenport. Through their every word, we feel their pain and also their spirit of faith in the questioning. Many people would be throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “What kind of God gives us this number of problems?” You may have also felt this way and questioned your faith. Let me share glimpses of how God stays close to us, even when life feels like it’s coming apart.
Years ago, I became friends with a Nigerian nun named Sister Fidelia Chukwu, SNDdeN from Nigeria. I even brought her to my home to stay with us, prompting my son to quip, “Why do we have nuns living with us? Why can’t we be like normal people?” As a School Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, she shared with me the spirit of her foundress, St. Julie Billiart, who suffered a severe trauma that led to paralysis. One witness said, “Though she could not walk, she was carried, her face always radiant with joy, repeating often, ‘Ah, how good is the good God!’”
St. Julie taught that life’s ups and downs do not measure God’s goodness. Rather, His goodness is measured by His constant presence through them. Father Richard Rohr says in his book “Falling Upward,” “Falling down is, in fact, moving forward. It is the pattern of transformation. Those who have fallen, failed, or ‘gone down’ are the only ones who understand up. Those who have somehow fallen into the hands of the living God, instead of into their own success and self-sufficiency, are the ones who know that grace is everywhere.”
God works with us when we stumble. Picture this: a group of people who had all been broken by past events in their lives sat at a table. Each was given a ceramic bowl, which they were asked to turn upside down. After covering the bowls with cloth, each was given a hammer to smash their bowls. They were then asked to take the broken pieces and, with glue, put the bowl back together. Once finished, you could still see where the pieces had been put back together. Using 14-carat gold paint, the participants painted over the cracks, resulting in a beautiful bowl adorned with gold.
What does this exercise tell us about life, faith, and God? The reality is that none of us gets through this life without falling down and literally or figuratively being broken. The person questioning their faith is feeling the brokenness. We all may have felt at one time or another that life has hit us hard. Father Henri Nouwen says it best, “God never sends suffering; He meets us in it.” God is the 14-carat gold that St. Julie Billiart confidently proclaimed, “Ah, how good is the Good God.” Father Rohr presents another way of approaching life in his book “Breathing Underwater,” when he says, “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. The Twelve Steps are for everyone because they name our universal addiction to control and our need for surrender. They are a spirituality of imperfection that finally works.”
This means that we can’t control the people and events around us. The world has programmed into us the thinking that we can control everyone and everything if we figure out, with God’s help, the “silver bullet” solution. Wrong. We are only responsible for ourselves. We are only responsible to other people. Life’s situations are simply a reality. Ultimately, it is we who make the problem. Take any reality, and it is our response to it that makes it a problem. Please don’t take my word for it. Listen to Jesus, “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil” (Matthew 6:34). Or, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest…learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart” (Matthew 11:28–29). Better still, “In the world you will have trouble, but take courage; I have conquered the world” (John 16:33).
(John Cooper is the business manager and pastoral associate at St. Anthony Parish in Davenport.)
