The Price of Trust

I love ‘critical biographies’ of Saints. Hagiography as a literary genre tends to make facile and one-dimensional portraits of our Hallowed Heroes, but critical biographies put color, flesh and blood on the alabaster. One of my favorites is by Frederick Jones, CSsR, who wrote Alphonsus de Ligouri: The Saint of Bourbon Naples, 1696-1787. It is a gold mine of scholarship and intimate knowledge of the Saint. I say ‘critical’ biographies so as to distinguish certain books about saints from mere hagiography. In other words, critical biographies often try to analyze and discover as much as can be found about the life, habits, virtues, and failures of the person. Hagiographies tend to emphasize, to the detriment of all other focuses, the virtues and the extraordinary in the life of the subject. I admit some critical biographies may border on the blasphemous, when they fail to treat a holy person with respect. However, I think most such biographies, far from detracting from their ‘aura’, only magnifies the grace of God, and shows how much God is capable of accomplishing in this frail, fallen condition we call humanity.

St. Alphonsus, to just take one example, would probably be placed by his Bishop in a mental institution, so acute were his struggles with depression, obsessive thoughts, and anger. His temperament was quintessentially Neapolitan; fiery and dramatic. If we took the man only from his own writings, the portrait which would emerge would be something between slightly exaggerated Mariologist and Moral Theologian of probing intellect. Yet none of these studies of his writings would indicate to us, unless indirectly, the immense physical and psychological suffering the great Doctor endured. His writings and methods are known to have healed perhaps millions of scrupulous people, yet so few know that his methods were at least partially developed out of his lifelong struggle with the same. He was betrayed by his nearest and dearest, and expelled even from the order he founded, the Redemptorists. Yet he was always so fond of saying the aspiration found in Psalm 20: Hi in equis, hi in curribus, nos autem in nomine Domini. “Some trust in horses, some in chariots: but we in the name of the Lord.” To top it off, his crippling physical pains deformed his body, causing him agonizing pain.

I regularly hear penitents tell me that they often pay for patience, and then I often hear them complain that God has heard their prayers! In my opinion, the hardest virtue to acquire is that which is intimately connected to patience: trust in God. I believe it was Pius XI who was told by a pious aide in the midst of a difficult dilemma to stand firm, because Jesus always “resigned himself to the will of the Father.” Pius responded, “Yes: but first, he sweat blood.” Pious platitudes, although at times helpful for anchoring the intention of the will, and the sight of the mind, also have a way of obscuring the unsettling reality that true piety is nothing less than the Cross of Christ. It is by suffering that God’s true servants are most known, and the face of his Christ revealed.

I think also of the prayer of St. Faustina: “Jesus, I Trust in Thee.” Even in this devotion, with the image of the Divine Mercy, the power of trust flows out of a pierced heart. Both the blood and the water have the power to wash us: the blood of the spotless Lamb of God, and the water of our tears. I often remind people who pray for Trust of God, that that grace is purchased with only one currency: tears. Long, dark nights with the “hour of the wolf”, the uncertainties of life and ministry, the injustices suffered and inflicted by both the world that hates us, and the Church that ought to love us: these are the cement on which trust is founded.

In my own meditation, I find it extremely interesting that the development of trust of God, along with its sister virtue, resignation to Divine Providence, occupy such a low place in contemporary spirituality, mostly because I think much of contemporary spirituality shies away from speaking frankly about the reality and inevitability of suffering. Our Lord speaks so beautifully about the crows, the lilies of the field, and how valued we are more than them. Yet we also, like Saint Teresa Avila, can also retort in the agonizing circumstances of life: “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!” Trust in God pays the deepest compliment to the divine benevolence, and greatly glorifies him.

Saint Paul’s salutation in his 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians should provide little doubt as to what role suffering and comfort, along with trust, take in the lives of a true apostle. St. Paul calls God the “father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-5). In other words, just as we share in Christ our sufferings, so we are also meant to share his comfort in the same. I think truly spiritual people see instinctively in certain men and women how suffering chisels wisdom into their spiritual features. There are those whose pain and suffering did not turn into the “root of bitterness” which the Book of Hebrews warns us about, but rather turned into another Sacred Heart, radiating grace, reconciliation and mercy. I often have pity on young Priests who do not suffer, and on older Priests, and even Bishops, who had ministries where everything was handed to them on a silver platter, the trajectory of whose life is marked less by submission to the Divine Will, than to the imposition of their own will.

What gives a man like St. Padre Pio, or a woman like St. Rita of Cascia, such perennial appeal to suffering men and women? It is because in these saints we can see ourselves, and how God, at the very least, by inviting us to trust, is liberating us from the curse of superficiality. The power we possess to console comes in large measure from our capacity to suffer. I think with loving affection of all the old Priests I knew throughout my life, to whom people confidently confided their woes and difficulties. Old Priests in particular tend to have that true gravitas which gives them a special grace of healing and consoling. Even young Priests can acquire that gravitas, that willingness to grow. The price is steep, but the fruits are sweet.

Once I had the privilege of making House Calls to an extremely educated woman who suffered from debilitating nerve disease. She was constantly aware that any day could in fact be her last. Sometimes visits had to be cancelled because she was bed bound and insensible. I liked to stay with her, and we had many truly spiritual talks.

A voracious reader, this woman gifted me with a book I have never forgotten, which is barely known except to scholars in English Literature: Diana Tempest by Mary Cholmondeley. As the name implies, the plot is largely about the ‘tempests’ in the lives of the characters, often of their own making. At one point, the author remarks on the turn of fortune in the main character with the following beautiful words:

“Sorrow with his pick mines the heart. But he is a cunning workman. He deepens the channels whereby happiness may enter, and hollows out new chambers for joy to abide in, when he is gone.”

Is this perhaps what St. Paul means when he says that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint”? (Romans 5:3-5)

Perhaps more than ever in our history, our culture suffers greatly from a deficit of trust. We distrust our politicians, our businessmen, our clergy. Spouses have difficulty with trusting, especially if they themselves are children of divorce. Most painful for we Catholics, trust has been so tragically broken between priests and people, from a multitude of angles, of which sexual abuse and other sins are the tip of the iceberg. Priests can’t trust their Bishops, or even each other. This is the work of the devil, and is causing the disintegration of every facet of civil society. Trust, once broken, is only gingerly restored, and regained over time. Yet men and women of good will must rebuild this same culture of trust, because it is the only way a culture of love can exist, because it is nearly impossible to love someone whom you cannot trust. However, the vulnerability that comes from love and trust is also necessary for that to happen.

As I mentioned in my last essay on the sterilizing effects of a culture that wants to basically eliminate risk in everything, bleeding, wounded trust is the only thing that, by the grace of God, can restore us to unity and apostolic fruitfulness. In this vein, let me offer a few suggestions on how we can rebuild trust.

Firstly, we must all be men and women who strive to build the virtue of trustworthiness. I think this also goes hand and hand with the virtues of friendship, and of loyalty.

Secondly, we must be men and women firmly committed to the Christian belief in the power of grace and the possibility of redemption. Our Lord’s first and strongest instinct is always to seek out the lost and the wayward. Or do we put up onerous barriers to rehabilitation, based more upon fear than upon love? The experience of grace in and of itself has the potential to be transformative to the one receiving it.

Thirdly, it would be helpful if we all adopted a practice of transparency and honesty with people we trust already, in order to “grow the circle”. By that I mean, speaking plainly and honestly in every day life, not excusing ourselves for our failures, seeking to understand and be compassionate for those of others, and in the garden of friendship, learning to let trust and truth grow together, for they are kin.

Finally, true trust in God and in others always involves the tragic possibility that we will be betrayed, because that is the nature of life and of people. We are all so very fragile in God’s sight. God alone does not disappoint us, although he may seem to do so when the circumstances of our lives do not turn out the way we may have envisioned. Yet in this, there is a mercy, as God frees us from the tendency that makes us most like the devils: the wicked, insubordinate desire to build a world and a life, purely by our own power and weak vision, a personal tower of Babel for ourselves, in which we, and not God, are the object of love and adoration.

In Dante’s Purgatorio, after following his guide Virgil through hell and the concentric rings of Mount Purgatory, his sins, represented by small letter “p”s on his forehead, are gradually erased. In so doing, he gains more sovereignty over himself. As our faith tells us, vice enslaves the human person, while virtue liberates. However, Dante’s love for his good and faithful guide, whom he trusted, marks the last obstacle before he can enter into the antechamber of heaven, and be introduced to the love of his life, the holy Beatrice. Virgil beckons Dante to leave him behind and to advance with greater trust to an even greater guide, who will take him to the heavens. Thus, Virgil’s last words to his charge are powerful and empowering:

Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;
libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
  per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio.

“Do not wait for further word or sign from me: your will is free, erect, and whole – to act against that will would be to err: therefore, I crown and miter you over yourself.”

In other words, Dante’s will is now liberated to love the good, and to trust in the goodness of the Maker of all Things. It is in so trusting that we too are “crowned and mitered”. That is to say, the end result of perfect trust is perfect internal harmony and inner peace. It is for this reason that Christ said, “You have faith in God, have faith also in me”, and links such faith to the peace which the world can never give.

Trust is the fruit of interior freedom. For those of us who lack it, either because we have seen it so cruelly betrayed or taken for granted, let us beg the good God to restore to us something of its suppleness, its vigor. Because life without love is a sterile wasteland, and trust alone gives the fertile ground for that love to bloom again. May God make us worthy to receive that as a lived reality.