“Why are you terrified, do you not yet have faith?”

          There are times in everyone’s life when Christ seems to be asleep in the boat, when you are tempted to question God’s existence, or at least whether He really cares about and truly loves you, when you want to call out, “Do you not care?” While there are certainly times when the storms of life seem too big, what if the problem is not so much that they are too big, but that they are not big enough?

          I want to tell you about a family that experienced such a great storm. The Bautistas are a very big, very united, very faithful family whose world was rocked when their grandparents were in a terrible car accident. Particularly affected was Maria, devoted wife, mother, and grandmother. The paramedics said that she would not survive. When she did survive, the doctors said that she would not wake up from the coma. When she woke up, they said that she would not be able to understand her family members. When she began to understand her family members, they said that she would never be able to get out of bed again. When she began to wriggle her toes and move her hands, they said that she would never be able to walk again. When she began to walk again, they could only be amazed. Today, she is physically active, able to attend Mass and play with her grandchildren – the things she loves most.

          When I went to visit Maria in the hospital, and it looked like she would never walk again, I asked her how she was handling it, knowing that she is a woman of strong faith, but that anyone could struggle to accept such a fate. Her response was simple: “We accept the holy will of God.”

          Maria’s family is very big, and very close-knit. They all came together to care for her in her home, to be with her day and night. It was clear that this accident had happened not only to her, but to her entire family. It was beautiful to see her, and really her entire family, “on their feet again.”

          But it wasn’t long. Only weeks after she was in the clear, her grandson Alan was in a terrible car accident, and did not survive. I have celebrated many funerals, from pious daily communicants to newborn children and even homicide victims. I have looked from the pulpit at widows and widowers, grieving parents and siblings, and even a church full of gang members reeking of marijuana. But there was nothing like the sight of this family, just back on its feet, and knocked down by tragedy again. When I gave my condolences to his grandmother, she simply told me once again: “We accept the holy will of God.”

          Here was someone who firmly believed the words of St. Paul today, that “those who live … no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” To no longer live for oneself – when you hear those words, you likely think of the need to be focused more on others than yourself, to live a life of service, dedication, and self-sacrifice. That is a good start, certainly, but this is merely natural virtue. Life in Christ is a calling to something much greater, something supernatural. After all, you do not need to be a Christian to recognize that there is greater happiness in serving others than in serving yourself (though I would note that, due to the consequences of original sin, those who live without the grace of Christ are much less likely to live in such a way, even if it is possible).

          St. Paul means something more profound here. He means not only to live for others, but to live “for HIM who for [your] sake died and was raised.” This means living with the confidence that your life has already been given over to Christ (not when you “accepted Christ as your personal Lord and savior,” but when the grace of Baptism re-made your soul to be an image of Christ Himself. This is why Paul tells us that “we regard no one according to the flesh. … Whoever is in Christ is a new creation.”

          That heroically faithful woman could accept God’s holy will because she had confidence that her life, her grandson’s life, the life of her entire family, had already been given over to Him, that they no longer had any claim on their own life that could possibly conflict with God’s primacy. “You have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God,” Paul likewise tells us in Colossians. What is old has already passed away, and the new is already coming.

          When the storms of life are small, we can be tempted to think that we can handle them without the Lord, that we are better off without Him. But when the storms of life are big, we have little choice but to renew our trust in the Lord, and so we can see why He allows those big storms, so that you recognize that you are insufficient on your own.

At the same time, like the Apostles, it can be easy to wonder whether and how the Lord is at work in those storms. What did the Apostles do when they think that the Lord does not care about their plight? “They woke him,” St. Mark tells us. Before they woke Him, they necessarily went to Him. Just as Christ was in the stern of the boat, the very same Christ is here in the tabernacle and will break into our time and this place on the altar in this Holy Mass. He is waiting for you to share your doubts, hesitations, and fears, just as He patiently waited for the Apostles to realizes that they needed to run to Him in the storm.

          After the burial of Maria’s grandson, I went back to the church and knelt right before the Blessed Sacrament. “I don’t like your plans,” I told Him. I cannot tell you that I felt better right away, or that everything got better at once. That is not the way that things work most of the time or hardly any of the time. It is a persistent habit of devotion that can build up the faith of the woman who accepts every tragedy, every storm, as an opportunity to die more fully to self, and to live more fully in Him.

          What does she say to the Lord when she and her family come to Mass together each Sunday, or during the week when they or many other brothers and sisters in Christ have Mass offered for her grandson, or the many other times I saw her coming to the church to pray? What does she say when the storms are not just in the past, but still ever present in the heart of a mother and grandmother, always going out to those she loves? I have not asked, but I imagine that somewhere in the prayers coming from that faithful heart is, “I accept your holy will.”

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV