Today’s readings: Habbakkuk 1,2-3. 2,2-4; 2 Tim. 1,6-8.13-14; Lk 17,5-10.
True faith never induces us to live in denial. Reality has to be faced and called by its name. Very often our problem as believers is that not only is our faith not bold enough to move mountains, but that it just stares helpless in the face of the crude reality around us.
We say we believe in a God of justice and yet remain impotent in the face of perpetrators of violence, dictatorships, unemployment, abuse in places of work, and all sorts of violence that hits our daily headlines.
Today’s generations are becoming impatient with the futile promises of politicians, of financial experts who analyse impeccably the causes of recession without providing remedies. We read about the steady increase of unemployment hitting mainly the young, and keep wondering why people end up in addiction and depression.
Perhaps we, supposedly people of faith, are too patient and too tolerant of what should otherwise never be tolerated. In all this, one may wonder what is really sinful, whether our tolerant patience or the impatient violence of whoever has all reason to cry to heaven because cries on earth remain unheard.
Today’s readings all push in this direction. There is faith and faith. The gospel invites us to distinguish clearly and not dilute faith into something soft and timid. The prophet’s prayer in the first reading is daring, surely not of the devotional type: “Why do you set injustice before me, why do you look on where there is tyranny?”
In everyday life, it may be very misleading to confuse what comes from God and what pertains to our sphere as humans. When this happens, suffering can easily become unendurable, we can very easily enter into God’s presence with an accusing finger rather than in adoration. That is what distorts faith.
In the first reading, Habakkuk is angry with God, as we often are. He loses patience, and consequently peace. When that happens, it shatters our faith, closes us in our own selves, struggling in vain to get answers that never come. To the prophet’s plea “How long, Lord, am I to cry for help while you will not listen”, the Lord replies: “If it comes slowly, wait, for come it will, without fail”.
That may sound too delusional in our long nights or in the nights of the world, particularly for all those who have no hope. When nothing happens, we falter because we want things to happen, and rightly so. When Elie Wiesel wrote Night, it was hailed as a “slim volume of terrifying power”. It is his narration of the atrocity he experienced as a child.
So many today still have atrocities to narrate that mark them for life. There is so much abuse behind our home walls, in our places of work and entertainment, even in friendships and loves betrayed. There is so much violence and oppression, censored on our screens yet allowed and perpetuated in real life.
It takes little to name the anguish. But that is taxing on faith when God remains silent. Facing the Abusing God is the title of the remarkable and bold work by author David Blumenthal. He explores the horror of human suffering through the eyes of two groups who probably have never before been put together – the survivors of the Holocaust and the survivors of child abuse. Human suffering, in its intensity and magnitude, shakes our theology to its core.
Our theologies were not conducive to dare to scream at God like most prophets did. It is boldness of faith that brings you to that, not lack of faith. Many a time we are led to think that having faith should make you hold back and suffer in silence. I would not outrightly exclude that suffering in silence may also possibly turn out to be a healing journey.
But the God of the prophet Habakkuk and of the apostle Paul, the God of great mystics and reformers like Catherine of Siena and John of the cross, the God of Thomas Merton and Archbishop Oscar Romero was a God who does not give a spirit of timidity but of boldness. He is a God you can argue with.