Not Seeing… Yet Believing

This is a computer-generated transcription that has been included to make the homily searchable.  It has not been verified by the author.

 “Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.” There’s something unusual about the gospel today. Usually, most Sundays the gospel rotates. But the gospel today for this Feast of Divine Mercy is always this one gospel that we heard today. “Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.” And I was struck that also in the second reading today of St. Peter, that really actually does rotate, also there, St. Peter also emphasizes that of believing without seeing. And so, on this Feast of Divine Mercy, I felt it would be good to take a little bit of time to try to understand what Jesus means here, because He’s talking about the situation that we’re living. Because life can be hard, faith can be hard. It’s not always easy to believe, and we don’t see, when we don’t feel what we don’t understand. And so, let’s take some time to look at these very simple words of Jesus. “Blessed are those who do not see, and yet believe.” There’s like three parts that first of all, the fact of not seeing. Second, then the act of believing, even without seeing. And third, the blessing that comes from that. So first of all, the first point of not seeing.  We as humans are .very, very influenced by what we experience. And so, Thomas, when he was seeing Jesus, strong, impressive, working so many miracles, amazing healings, raising people from the dead, casting out demons with His power, acclaimed by the crowds, it wasn’t hard to believe in Jesus. When a person sees amazing signs of God’s power, when the Church is strong, and respected, and feels triumphant, when we feel God’s presence, His peace, His joy, His power, His light, it’s not hard to believe in God. Thomas felt his faith was strong. But was he really believing in Jesus or was he trusting more in his own perception? Because then the great trial came when Jesus was abandoned, condemned, humiliated, tortured, killed, it would seem defeated, rejected by the crowd, His enemies seemed triumphant, the Church, which was just beginning seemed destroyed. And even Thomas and his fellow apostles felt how weak and sinful they were, how unworthy they were. And so, Thomas, because of what he just experienced, he couldn’t believe in the resurrection. The Catechism talks about the trials that our faith can experience. It says, it’s quoting St. Paul. St. Paul says, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” That’s precisely what Jesus is talking about. Our Christian life is walking by faith, not by sight. So that’s very different, for instance, from driving, when you’re driving, it’s good to drive by sight, right? Not just by faith, you don’t just close your eyes and say, Lord, guide me while you’re driving. I hope you didn’t do that to get here. But so, we need our sight. We need our human experience, our human perception for human things. But faith is leading us into a divine world of mysteries. And so, the Catechism says, “Even though enlightened by God in whom it believes, faith is often lived in darkness.” Faith is a light, but it’s often lived in darkness, and the catechism says can be put to the test. And sometimes, not just that we don’t see, it’s that what we do see seems to contradict our faith. The Catechism says, “The world we live in often seems very far from the One promised us by faith. Our experiences of evil and suffering, injustice and death often seem to contradict the good news of the gospel, they can shake our faith and become a temptation against it.” And probably many of us have experienced our faith being shaken. And we know many people’s faith has been shaken and lost. And the example, that extreme example was the cross, in which the faith and hope of the disciples or the apostles was under attack. They were confused, they were discouraged. For many, their faith was crushed. That was then, but many are experiencing also terrible trials right now in our time, in which it becomes very difficult to believe in God.  We’re bombarded by our world, which acts as if God doesn’t exist. All the movies and all the shows, it presents a world in which basically God doesn’t exist. And our Christian faith has always ridiculed and undermined our world, which is always spreading fear in a world in which maybe we don’t see signs of God, receives on the contrary signs of the triumph of evil. And even in the Church. We’ve had terrible scandals. And even in the Church, so many people are turned off, they say, I want to be spiritual, but I don’t believe in religion, because all organized religion is just human. And there is so much humanity in the Church. And when we experience the weakness and sinfulness of the Churchs’ members, even the leaders, the pastors of the Church. And so, in these situations, we don’t see. And when we say we don’t see that means not just see, but also means we don’t feel, maybe we don’t understand. And we can feel isolated. And then we also have the weight of our own sins, when we feel weak and unworthy. And so, it’s right now in these times that we’re living, that God is calling for heroes of faith. There are other times in which it was easier to believe.  Right now, it takes great courage and great faith, to continue to believe. And God’s given us the opportunity, calling us to be the heroes of faith for our time. So that leads us to the second point of believing, even without seeing. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. With God, all things are possible, to go from human faith to divine faith. And the great example we have is of our Blessed Mother, who believed the words of Jesus, His prophetic words. And even though she experienced the evil and the pain, of that terrible suffering of Her son like no one else, and her faith and her hope, her trust, was attacked by satan in a way that we can never understand. And yet, in the midst of that, in the midst of that darkness, in the midst of not seeing, she continued to believe, to trust, to hope, to hang on. You know, this area here in the hill country, we know that there’s dangers of flash flooding. And we’ve had, not very long ago, terrible tragic times in which a person was swept away by a flood, because they didn’t have anything or anyone to hang on to. And that’s kind of what’s going on right now. There’s this terrible flood, and we need something that we can, or someone that we can hang on to. And that’s what faith is. It’s permitting us to hang on to the Lord. Many saints have experienced this darkness. St. John of the Cross, the great mystical doctor of the Church speaks of, on this path of union to God, he emphasizes the dark night that the soul experiences, the dark night. And how can it be dark if faith is a light? Faith is a divine light But as St. John of the Cross says, “this Divine Light lies beyond all human understanding, taste, feeling and imagining.” So, it’s a divine light. So, it’s so far beyond our human perception that we often experience it as darkness. And so, St. John of the Cross says, “Those who want to reach union with God should advance neither by understanding, nor by the support of their own experience, nor by feeling or imagination, but by faith in God. For God’s being cannot be grasped by our intellect, appetite, imagination, or any other sense. Because it’s beyond, it’s divine.” And so, the challenge is to trust God, more than we trust our own perceptions. And again, the example is at the cross. At the cross, Jesus didn’t look like the triumphant Messiah savior. He certainly didn’t look like God. It didn’t seem that way. It didn’t appear that way. And it took faith in Him and in His Word, to continue to believe. Another example, St. Therese of Lisieux as a girl, she was brought up in a very devout Catholic family. And so when she would hear of atheists, people who didn’t believe in God, she couldn’t believe that they really existed, she thought they must be pretending.  But at the end of her life, the Lord, let her experience this temptation, this temptation to despair of the atheist, of this dark night.  And even just a few months before her death, when she was dying of tuberculosis, suffering a lot, she wrote, “God allowed my soul to be overwhelmed with darkness. And the thought of heaven, which had consoled me from my earliest childhood, now became a subject of conflict and torture. This child did not last merely for days or weeks, I have been suffering for months, and I still await deliverance.” That is, she’s still suffering from it. “I wish I could express what I feel but it is beyond me. What must have passed to this dark tunnel, to understand its blackness. When I sing of the happiness of heaven, I do not feel any joy therein, for I sing only of what I wish to believe.” That is, she is saying that she doesn’t feel right now a joy of thinking about heaven. But it’s only by a pure act of faith that she can express that. So, it’s a faith which is beyond what she feels and what she senses. And St. Faustina herself, the great prophet of Divine Mercy, wrote, “beyond all abandonment,” that is when she would feel abandoned by God, “beyond all abandonment, I trust and in spite of my own feeling, I trust in spite of my feeling, I trust and I am being completely transformed into trust, often in spite of what I feel.” So, she wasn’t often feeling it, but she was continuing to trust.  She writes, “Lord, sometimes you lift me up to the brightness of visions. And then again, you plunged me into the darkness of night, in the abyss of my nothingness, and my soul feels as if it were alone in the wilderness. Yet above all things, I trust in you Jesus, for you are unchangeable. My moods change, but you are always the same, full of mercy.” Our moods change our feelings, our emotions change, and the devil knows how to manipulate them. But Jesus, and His mercy do not change. And then she writes, “now I see that if God wants to keep us all in darkness, no book, no confessor can bring it light.”  Note that here she said, “If God wants,” so this can be the work of God, God to form a soul can lead it into this darkness, this dark night. So, it’s not necessarily a sign that something is wrong. It can be God’s own formation for us. So, our little portal of community here the Mission of Divine Mercy, that’s the way we’ve sensed, that we sensed many years ago the Lord want us to take that name Mission of Divine Mercy and then we were gradually trying to understand better what was the special charism or the particular mission that He wanted. And gradually, He revealed it to us, that it was faith, faith so that God can act.  Faith, because it’s our faith and our trust, which permit Him to pour out His mercy to forgive, His mercy. And so, in this is really important, our fidelity, our faithfulness is not measured by our feelings. But it’s measured by our obedience to His will. And so, this leads us to the final point. “Blessed,” Jesus says, “are those who believe without seeing.”  When we’re going through these trials, we may not feel very blessed. But the Lord who knows all the eternity, which is awaiting us, tells us that that is a blessing. So, if God gives us beautiful graces of consolation, and peace and joy, and visions, and so forth, we should accept those with gratitude, because if He gives them to us, it’s because there we are, others need them. But also, we shouldn’t be discouraged if we don’t experience those graces, or if we experienced them at one time, but we don’t experience them anymore. If on the contrary, we experience dryness, and desolation, and darkness and confusion, it’s not that God doesn’t love us. But he may be leading us on this path of formation of faith. And I often think of an example. I’ve shared this with some of you in our Encounters, that when I was studying in France, when I was in France, at one point, I was living in a little village, which was right next to what had been a royal hunting forest. And so, they had beautiful trees as a pretty humid area. So, these big, beautiful trees, like trees, like five or six or even more feet in diameter and huge trees. I remember, as I like to take a walk in this forest, but I remember some time, one time going through the forest, after there had been a storm or kind of a storm, but it wasn’t a huge storm. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t very, I didn’t think it was a very impressive storm. But I noticed there were a number of these huge trees, which had been toppled by the wind. And since they’d been toppled, I could see their roots and these huge trees had very little roots, like the root was sometimes like, all extended, like, six, seven feet from the tree, trees which I don’t know, maybe 60 or 100 feet high. And I thought of the difference between that, and years later, when I was living on a little ranch in Hebronville, about two hours south of here in south Texas, where there’s no royal hunting forest down there. And what we had mainly were mesquite trees, which are oftentimes seen like as weeds down there, and the mesquite trees, none of them grew very high. But it was striking that when twice, the eye of a hurricane came right over that ranch. And I was struck that there were no mesquite trees blown over. Because the mesquite trees, like so the mesquites have very, very deep roots, a taproot. And they don’t grow very high. But the roots are very deep, and so they’re very anchored. And I compare those to those big trees in France had so much humidity, that the roots were pretty superficial. And so, they were very impressive. And they grew very fast and high. But they weren’t very rooted in there. So, they were very vulnerable. These poor little mesquite trees, which weren’t impressive at all, but which had such deep roots that the storm cannot knock them over. And also they were kind of humble, they stayed low. And so they weren’t impressive, but they were, they were much stronger. And we would have terrible droughts down there. But even in the midst of those droughts, these mesquite trees were happy and green and smiling, because their roots were so deep. They had learned to go much deeper, and so that this drought didn’t affect them. And so that’s the danger of God gives us, always giving us consolations, and so forth. Our faith can often be superficial, and in danger from the winds and the storms or if we hit a period of drought. So He often has to form us with this dryness and darkness so that our roots go deeper, and the roots not just of what we feel superficially, but they’re rooted in the word of God, and in the presence of God Himself. St. Faustina said, well imagine two different scenarios. Say, God gives you a lot of consolations in your prayers, you have a prayer full of light, and joy and peace in the presence of God is so strong, that the hours just fly by, prayers, just so beautiful and so fulfilling. You don’t even notice the time going by. And imagine another scenario in which you’re trying to pray, but you’re going, you’re going through a very difficult time in your life, and you feel dry inside, you don’t feel very spiritual, you don’t feel very much the presence of God. And maybe on the contrary, you’re struggling with a lot of anxiety and fears. And you try to pray, but you get a lot of distractions and all this anxiety. And so prayer is like a, it’s like a battle. And you’re always looking at your watch. Oh, it’s only five minutes gone by.  This seems like things are taking so long, it’s so hard. And so, which of those times of prayer is more fruitful?  St. Faustina says, “One act of trust at such moments of darkness and suffering,” (how long does it take to make one act of trust? In just an instant, right, you can make an act of trust), “One act of trust in those moments of darkness and suffering, gives greater glory to God than whole hours past and prayer filled with consolation.” So, if God gives you prayer, fruit, consolation, great, thank Him for that. But it’s easy to pray when He does that. But to trust in God, when even prayer is difficult, that trust has great merit, as Saint Faustina says, gives greater glory to God. And so this is the time that we’re living in, a time for heroic acts of trust, to pull down God’s mercy. And the very image we have here, the famous image of Divine Mercy shows what God is doing. He’s pouring out His mercy. But it also shows what we need to do. And have you noticed the there’s the instructions, this image comes with instructions, like an owner’s manual. Thankfully, the instructions are very short. It’s just one line – “Jesus, I trust in You.” That’s what we need to do. God pours out His mercies, but what He needs from us is trust, is faith. As Jesus says to Saint Faustina that His mercy is drawn only by one vessel only, that is trust. God is pouring out His mercy, and He can, but we only receive it in a measure in which we trust. And our trust can bless, not just us, draw grace sand mercy not just for us, but for many other souls. And so especially on this day in which the Lord has told us, the special promise of this day, for those who receive Holy Communion in a state of grace, the complete forgiveness of sins and punishment. We may not feel anything when we receive Holy Communion today, we may not feel or sense anything, but we can make an act of trust in Him. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”  The Mass that we’re living right now, is an opportunity in which we may not see the Lord, we may not feel the Lord, we may not understand what’s happening in the Mass, but we can make an act of faith and trust beyond our feelings. And that’s a gift we’re giving to God, and a gift for graces from Him. So don’t be sad if you don’t feel anything. Say, Lord. I’m going to make an act of faith, not because I feel something, but because I trust in You, I believe in you. And that’s the act of faith and trust which draws great graces. And as we heard St. Thomas, after seeing Jesus, fell down and said, “My Lord and my God.” So, when the host, and when the Precious Blood is consecrated and raised, You can say also with Thomas in your heart, no matter whether you feel it or not, “My Lord and my God.”  When you receive Him in Holy Communion, you can say, “My Lord and my God.” And the more that the fact that you don’t feel anything, that’s okay, that can be even a much greater act of faith, a much more valuable, much more powerful act of faith that you’re making. So let us ask, in this Mass, our Blessed Mother to help us, even if we’re living and have not seen or not feeling or not understanding the grace, the blessing of believing in Him as our Blessed Mother did. Jesus, I trust in You. Amen.

And I’m just going to say now a few words in Spanish …..

KEYWORDS / PHRASES:
John 20:19-31
Doubting Thomas
1 Peter 1:3-9