“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

          It is easy to get discouraged hearing these words. Just when we think our faith is small and insignificant, and when the Apostles go the Lord humbly to ask for more, He seems to put them down. Since no tree has ever obeyed my command to uproot and move itself into the sea, my faith must be very small indeed.

          Our Lord is saying something very different, though. His point is that He can do incredible things with only a small amount of faith on our part. Humble beginnings lead to incredible transformations.

          I have seen this many times over in converts to the Catholic faith. So many people start with the smallest interest or curiosity, or just a willingness to hear us out. And then not only does that initial curiosity bloom into a faith that takes hold of their entire lives, but I even see people who have been Catholics for a matter of months bringing more non-Catholics to Mass with them than most Catholics will in their entire lives!

          Our Lord follows up this example of the mustard seed with a seemingly unrelated but similarly discouraging story about a servant who works hard for his master but is apparently not entitled to any thanks or appreciation: “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’” The point, though, is that it is through perseverance that faith can grow and accomplish marvels.

          That perseverance often happens in the day-to-day of life, in your equivalent of “plowing or tending sheep” and then coming home to serve others once again. We also see that perseverance amidst suffering has a particular role in growing our faith. It is to the suffering prophet Habakkuk, enduring the miserable exile of his people in a foreign land, that the Lord promises that His message of consolation “still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; … it will surely come, it will not be late. The rash one has no integrity; but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.”

          Likewise, we hear St. Paul encouraging his disciple Timothy to perseverance by “stirring up” the grace he has received through the Sacrament of Orders to “bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God,” imitating his spiritual father, St. Paul, who writes to Timothy from his own imprisonment for the sake of the Gospel.

          The Church’s tradition tells us that St. Timothy did indeed stir up this spirit “of power and love and self-control” in his tireless work of evangelization and eventually giving his life as a martyr. At age 80, he was still filled with that courageous spirit as he tried to stop a procession in honor of the goddess Diana, preaching the Gospel to the adherents of the pagan cult until they dragged him through streets with them and then stoned him to death.

          Sometimes I question the value of homilies because, despite having heard so many of them, I remember so few. But some of them must have been effective, because even if I can’t remember what they said, the evidence seems to be that I was motivated to persevere in practicing the Catholic faith and to saying “yes” to my vocation.

          But one of the very few homilies I do remember included a story about a woman who was a model of perseverance. The priest was visiting her in the hospital. She had suffered the amputation of multiple limbs, then had a heart attack or stroke, then her son died of cancer, and on and on with a seemingly unending list of tragedies the details of which are lost to me. But what I remember distinctly is that the woman was incredibly faithful and trusting in God amidst all of it, and the priest asked her, “How can you still have such strong faith in God while all this is happening?” And the woman looked at him, slightly confused at the question. “God has been so good to me.”

          “God has been so good to me.” If faith is nurtured by perseverance, then perseverance is nurtured by gratitude, by gratitude for the people I serve in the drudgery of daily life, gratitude for the faith I’ve received, gratitude even for the chance to suffer. The same Apostles who ask the Lord to increase their faith, when they are put on trial by the Jewish authorities after Pentecost, “left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name” of Christ.

          I used to think of gratitude as the White Christmas “count your blessings instead of sheep” feel-good cutesy sort of thing that you find in pop spirituality low on real content (what a friend of mine calls “squishy Catholicism”).  But gratitude is so much more that. Gratitude is a fundamental posture, an attentiveness to the people and things around us.

          Socrates famously said that “philosophy begins in wonder.” We wonder at the world around us; we wonder why it’s there in the first place, why there is something instead of nothing, and we start to ask questions. Gratitude also begins in wonder. This fundamental posture of attentiveness to the goodness of the things and people around us leads us to give thanks to their Creator. When we lose that attentiveness to the goodness around us, especially by attentiveness to the virtual world instead of the real world, we lose gratitude, and thus perseverance, and thus faith.

          To have greater faith, we need greater perseverance, for which we need greater gratitude, for which we need greater wonder. In the month of October, the Catholic Church in the United States observes Respect Life Month.   Few things evoke wonder like the mysterious beginnings and endings of human life. The videos we are shown in health and biology class don’t tell us that a sperm and egg meet, producing an uninteresting and inconsequential lump of cells. They evoke wonder at the marvelous capacity of the human body to generate new life. Cultivating wonder at life’s marvelous beginnings leads to gratefulness for the gift of life, perseverance in cultivating the meaning and purpose of that life, and greater faith in the supernatural end of that life.

          We cultivate wonder when we defend the dignity of unborn life, from the moment of conception. We cultivate wonder when we marvel at the great gift of fertility, not seeing it as a threat to our happiness, to be medicated away or surgically removed, a bug rather than a feature of the human body. We cultivate wonder when we inculcate respect for and devotion to the elderly and infirm, visiting them, listening to them, and caring for them, even when it’s tough.

          We live in an un-enchanted world, a world without mystery and without beauty. Countless sociologists have written about how this de-enchantment of the modern world is an essential step on the path to secularism, to a world without supernatural faith. What we never bargained for, though, is that this loss of wonder and loss of faith would lead to so much disregard for the human person, to such an inhumane world.

          Re-capturing wonder, then, will be an essential part of restoring that interior disposition of gratitude, that posture of attentiveness to the goodness of the world around us, that is so essential for perseverance, which is so essential for faith. This wonder is present in the mystery of human life (especially in its origins and its earthly end), and in the mysteries of our faith that are unfolded before us in the Sacred Liturgy. Re-enchanting the world, re-enchanting our wonder at human life, will not happen unless we re-enchant how we celebrate our own highest act of gratitude, the sacrifice of thanksgiving in which we offer the Immaculate Victim, Christ Himself, back to the Father.

          Faith grows through perseverance; perseverance grows through gratitude; and gratitude grows through wonder. So, faith begins in wonder. And wonder begins here.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XXVII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXV