8
Confidence in God
THE knowledge of our need of redemption, as we have seen in the beginning, is the prime condition of our transformation in Christ, for it provides the only possible basis for our readiness to change.
We must have confidence in the whole message of love in the Gospels
However, that knowledge is condemned to sterility unless it is completed by another fundamental act on our part: our confidence in God. The knowledge that we are in need of redemption would merely cast us into despair unless we also knew that it is God’s will to redeem us. Even under the Old Covenant, man’s awareness of the necessity of redemption was qualified by his expectation of the promised Messiah.
To us, however, more is given: the faith that Christ has redeemed us, that the merciful love of God bends down to us; the faith that God wills to purify and to sanctify us and to fill us with His holy life; the faith that Baptism infuses a new supernatural life into us; and the faith that we are called by God, and that—though it be an incomprehensible mystery, since He, who rests in absolute beatitude, in no wise needs us—God seeks us in love and wills to be loved by us. In a word, we have been given Faith embracing the entire message of the holy Gospels. Confidence in God implies this living faith in the whole message of the Gospel; a faith that is no mere theoretical belief in an objective truth but a vital creed, by whose agency a superior Reality is continually at work informing our lives.
We must trust in the omnipotence of God
This creed must refer, first to the omnipotence of God. It is not enough for us to entertain a theoretical and general belief that God has the power to do everything. In every concrete situation we are faced with, the omnipotence of God must be so palpably present to us as to lessen the reality of all other facts, immutable as they may seem. Even in the face of outward dangers, which make our situation appear desperate—of a person whose state of mind robs us of all hope as to his conversion; of our own wretchedness when we see ourselves relapsing again and again; of the crushing weight of our sins committed in the past—we must always remain vitally aware of the paramount truth that the archangel Gabriel announced to the Blessed Virgin: “No word shall be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).
Not for a moment must we forget that “God can raise up children to Abraham out of stones.” We lack true faith so long as we are not constantly aware of what the Psalmist has thus put in words: “Whatsoever the Lord pleased he hath done, in heaven and on earth” (Ps. 134:6).
We must believe that God truly loves us
In the first place, we must believe in God’s omnipotence as regards our own concerns. In view of our misery and debility, of the sins whose weight we vainly struggle to shake off our shoulders, we must say with David, “Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed.” Yet, to be thus conscious of God’s omnipotence is only the first step; we must next believe in His love for us, His inscrutable mercy that has bent down to us in Christ, and aims at redeeming us.
“God (who is rich in mercy) for His exceeding charity wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together in Christ” (Eph. 2:4-5). We must firmly believe not only that God can save us but that, having called us to eternal communion with Himself, He wills to redeem us; nay, that He has redeemed us in Christ.
Nor does it suffice for us to believe that God is infinite Love as such, that St. John’s words, Dews caritas est (1 John 4:8), adequately define the essence of God for our understanding; we must believe in God’s love for its and experience the sweet inexorable compulsion of His love as it touches our person. Incomprehensible as it may seem to us that God should bestow His love upon us notwithstanding all our unworthiness, we must believe in this infinite love directed to each of us, and fall to our knees before this mystery.
We must believe in God’s omniscience
Further, confidence in God implies our belief in an omniscient and omnipresent divine love. He who truly trusts in God knows that, as St. Augustine says, “To us is promised the sight of a living and seeing God” (Sermo 69.1-2); that God, while resting in Himself in infinite beatitude, is yet constantly aware of us and presiding over our destinies.
He who trusts in God never forgets the words of the Lord, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:30). He knows that, even though we be far from Him, God is always near to us. He does not confine the operation of God to the limits that our rational thinking is wont to draw to it; rather he believes that, whether we turn our attention to God or not, we are continually in the hands of God and secure in His all-powerful and all-wise love.
Confidence in God also requires the consciousness that the glance of God penetrates everywhere and that nothing at all can escape it, should we even attempt to flee from its ken. “If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there; if I descend into hell, Thou art present” (Ps. 138:8). No matter what we do, and though we try ever so hard to hide ourselves, we are and remain the property of God and utterly impotent to elude Him: “I am the Lord, who search the heart, and prove the reins” (Jer. 17:10). Yet, no less definitely must we know that He from whom we cannot escape is infinite holiness and eternal love, “the great delight of our souls” (Laud of St. Francis of Assisi); He of whom the Psalmist says: “O taste, and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps. 33:9).
We must believe that we are each called individually by God
Finally, confidence in God implies the belief in our being called—as it were, addressed—by God. “I, the Lord, have called thee in justice, have taken thee by the hand, and have preserved thee” (Isa. 42:6). That consciousness of being called (which we have seen to be an element of humility) is equally relevant to what may in the full sense be termed confidence in God.
And the contrary attitude—that of considering ourselves, so to speak, excluded from God’s sphere of concerns; of contemplating the God of infinite love merely as onlookers; of deeming ourselves, in false modesty, too unimportant and unworthy to refer the divine call to ourselves—is not only inconsistent with humility but also indicates a deficiency in faith. For God not only loves us, He also wills to be loved by us. To each of us, too, Christ addresses the question He asked three times: “Simon, son of John, dost thou love me?” The mysterious word He pronounced on the cross—Sitio (I thirst)—expresses a never-ceasing call for our love.
Confidence in God, then, demands a vital faith in the integral message of the Gospels. But it demands more than that. Beyond giving credence to what the Faith proposes to us, we must relinquish the base on which we are primarily established and which provides us with our natural security, and must fully remove our center of gravity from our nature into God. We must definitively renounce the concept of attaining our goal by our own natural forces, and expect everything from the holy new life that Christ has infused into us in Baptism.
Confidence in God is essentially different from optimism
A clear distinction should be made between confidence in God and the natural sense of security that denotes the optimistic temper—the resiliency that is simply the fruit of a robust vitality. More, this sense of security must collapse and depart, so as to clear the ground for true confidence in God; for it is rooted precisely in that natural attitude of self-assertion which the true Christian is bound to abandon.
To interpret this natural sense of security, this rugged trust we place in our own nature, as confidence in God is a most deplorable error; for it cannot but taint our relation to God with a note of presumptuous platitude. “The good Lord will arrange everything somehow”—such people are wont to say. They are never roused into a full awareness of man’s metaphysical situation; their vital buoyancy prompts them to skip, as it were, that all-important stage in the soul’s way to God—contrition. They spare themselves the fear of God, which is “the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 110:10); they forget “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” (Heb. 10:31). This pitfall of a comfortable smugness masquerading as religiosity we must studiously avoid; in full awareness of the gravity of our metaphysical situation, in penitent humility we must lift our eyes to God, and in constant effort work for our sanctification. At the same time, we must bear in mind that it is not on the basis of our nature but through Christ and in Christ alone that a real victory over our sinfulness can be obtained. Our life must be integrally reposed on our faith in the new supernatural principle we have received in holy Baptism, according to the words of St. Paul: “For when I am weak, then am I powerful” (2 Cor. 12:10).
We must establish the center of our own personality in God alone
Again and again we may observe ourselves relying and depending on our nature—now in the sense of minimizing our defects in the spirit of a natural optimism, now in that we are moved to helpless despair when our infirmities reveal themselves—a sure indication that we have not yet acquired true confidence in God, that we have not yet transported the center of our personality into the supernatural and are still clinging, as it were, to our native selfhood. Otherwise, in spite of (and linked to) our repentance of our lapses; in spite of the pain due to our awareness of being still so far removed from God, we should be filled with joy because we have come to know ourselves better and gotten rid of our illusions about our character.
For, as we have seen it earlier, the very fact of our being more deeply pervaded by the light of truth renders us more closely attached to God. Do we not know, after all, that we must expect nothing from our nature? How can we thus feel deceived and thrown off our balance, whenever we meet with a tangible sign of our imperfection? Ought we not, rather, to count with it beforehand and to be happy and grateful if we can at least detect its concrete manifestations, so as to make sure in what respects we must try to amend with God’s help?
Contrition is compatible with confidence in God
The abyss of our faults, the immense distance that still separates us from the perfection which God has set before us as our goal—they may well prompt us to say: “Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us” (Tob. 8:10); yet they must never cause us to lose heart. Rather we must say, again, with David; “Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow” (Ps. 50:9); and believe firmly that the mercy of God is greater than all the vastness of our weakness and infidelity.
Certainly, whenever we have offended God by any definite transgression, whenever we have betrayed Christ in any manner, we should be filled with profound contrition. Even then, however, we should not for a moment flee from God, nor yield to the temptation of doubting either His omnipotence or His mercy. What we are to do is to fall down before Him in penitence and to flee into His merciful arms. Such moments precisely are the test of our confidence in God, of the firmness of our faith in God’s mercy, from which no sin can, in statu viae, separate us irrevocably.
It has been noted on an earlier occasion that what brought Judas to perdition was not his betrayal of the Savior but the fact that, shaken with remorse, he despaired of the mercy of God: in other words, that he lacked confidence in God. The deeper our contrition, the brighter and the more steadfast must be our faith in the all-powerfulness and all-mercifulness of God.
Habitual sin sorely tests our confidence in God
Our trust in God is exposed to a particularly hard test if we have to wrestle with a habitual sin. When we again and again relapse into the same fault, when all our moral effort seems ineffective and all our religious zeal fruitless, we shall almost inevitably feel tempted to lose patience, to get discouraged and give up the struggle, or to remonstrate with God; or again, to despair of God’s help and believe ourselves abandoned by Him. The very fact that we have honestly striven to overcome our defect, that we have done so relying on God’s help, that we have been eager to follow His call, and yet encountered defeat, is likely to upset our equilibrium and threatens to throw us into utter confusion.
Yet we must believe in God’s inexhaustible love and mercy
It is in such situations, precisely, that our unconditional trust in God has to assert itself. We must stick unswervingly to the belief that God loves us with an infinite love and wilts our sanctification, whatever our spiritual status may appear to our eyes. He who truly confides in God does not presume to decide himself, by experience, whether God is intent on saving him or has withdrawn from him. Once he has absorbed the message of the Gospels, his conviction of God’s infinite mercy, of God’s inexhaustible love which embraces him also, is so firm and unconditional as to preclude its dependence on any confirmation drawn from experience. He does not arrogate to himself a competence to ascertain from the evidence of facts whether God has turned from him and abandoned him.
On the contrary, he knows that nothing can come from God that is not a manifestation of His love, and that every situation must be a priori considered against this irremovable background. Much as his ever-recurrent backslidings may depress him, he will seek their cause in himself alone, in his own weakness and lack of zeal; and at the same time thank God for the humiliation to which he owes a clear consciousness of his weakness. How could he judge on his own authority what God means thereby to convey to him!
Even in these disappointments, he will humbly look for the traces of God’s love, and abide by the words of St. Paul: “For I know in whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 1:12). Aware of the untiring mercy of God, full of confidence he will again and again begin anew.
Our confidence comes not from our own earthly fortunes, but from “who God is”
For this exactly is the essence of trust that, instead of inferring from the symptoms—from the way we are treated in one respect or another—what a person’s intentions are, we assume them to be good and then interpret the situation in the light of this prime assumption. Suppose I make the acquaintance of a person and from my various experiences concerning him derive a conception of his character and of his emotional attitude to me. Suppose, again, that I arrive at the point of forming the judgment, “I have implicit trust in this person; there is no one I should trust more.”
From this moment onward, I no longer judge that person’s character from his behavior; I no longer proceed, as it were, from the appreciation of his single acts to a comprehension of his nature or his essential position. Rather I proceed, henceforth, in the inverse sense: I interpret all his acts in the light of the definitive concept I have formed of his character.
This implies that, even though his forthcoming acts should seem to contradict the picture I have made of his personality or of his attitude to me, I shall keep to this central determination of his essence, telling myself that I must either be mistaken about the facts or ignorant of the particular motives which had impelled the person in question to behave in the way he did, and that they cannot be repugnant to the loftiness of character or the kind dispositions towards me which I have ascribed to him.
Let it be admitted that in our relations with a human being, we may again arrive at a point where—be it on the strength of many symptoms or even because of one unequivocal indication that retains its validity after having heard the person in question—the conclusion imposes itself that his central attitude has changed. For every human being may change; he may fall; his love may cease.
Yet, in relation to God, “in whom there is no shadow of alteration” (James 1:17), who is goodness and mercy, of whom the Psalmist says: “For His mercy is confirmed upon us: and the truth of the Lord remaineth for ever” (Ps. 116:2), our trust must be absolute; the possibility of its being dislodged by any kind of experience whatsoever must be precluded axiomatically.
Whereas God’s merciful love speaks to us in all benefits and blessings which constantly surround us, and above all, in His eternal Word which has become flesh, of which St. Paul says, “the goodness and kindness of God our Savior appeared” (Titus 3:4), it is by no means an absence of this Divine love which manifests itself to us in our misfortunes or failures. In these we must seek the traces of our guilt on the one hand and the hidden love of God on the other, for we know that “his mercy endureth for ever.”
Our consciousness of being children of God and of being secure in His all-powerful and all-wise love must provide the central presupposition from which we view everything, be it joy or misery, be it the tangible help of God or the apparent failure of our endeavors. He whose confidence in God is genuine will, whenever his failures or his relapses threaten to discourage him, flee into the arms of God with undiminished trust, entreat God’s help with increased fervor, and combat his defects with greater vigilance than ever.
God answers all prayers with omniscient charity
It is said sometimes that, when in spite of all our prayers a thing we have dearly wished for falls short of realization, our prayer has not proved efficacious. There is only one good for which we know that our prayers shall be granted: our eternal salvation. To this good all other goods that we may enjoy are subordinated; they are genuine goods only so long as they are subservient to it. Whether some single good is subservient to that supreme end, and in what way, we can never determine with absolute certainty; knowledge thereof belongs to God exclusively.
Hence, we must never say that God has rejected our prayer; from the fact that our wish has not been fulfilled we must in no wise infer that God has turned His face from us or that our prayer has passed unheard. Rather we must assume that God knows better than we do about what furthers our salvation; that the ultimate intention of our prayer, our true happiness, has been realized precisely through God’s refusal, in this case, to grant our concrete request.
Nor is this all: even in the context of our earthly welfare we may often observe that something we deplored as a great calamity subsequently turns out to be highly fortunate for us. Who of us cannot remember occasions when he strove with all his might to attain a certain object, begging God to grant his desire, only to thank God, a while later, for having withheld from him an apparent benefit which he now sees would have involved him in disaster.
He who has the right confidence in God knows that his prayer is never condemned by God, whose merciful glance is always turned towards us; but he also knows that God alone can judge what profits us best and that, therefore, His answer is always the answer of omniscient charity.
Again—and more important, perhaps—he knows that the nonfulfillment of our request, though we may feel it as a heavy blow, must in reality accord with what is objectively more valuable: in other words, that we ought not to consider the decisions of God exclusively from the narrow angle of our life and our desires. On the contrary, it is the adjustment of our wills to the objectively good that we should care about: “Grant Thy peoples that they may love what Thou commandest and desire what Thou dost promise” (Collect of the fourth Sunday after Easter).
Prayers denied are nonetheless valuable as words addressed to God
This is not to say, however, that we must not pray except for the salvation of our (or other people’s) souls. We may, and should, pray for any legitimate good, and for the averting of evils, as does the holy Church: “From plague, famine, and war deliver us, O Lord.” The prayer of supplication, by which we humbly solicit His aid—expecting everything from Him—is pleasing to God. In his Second Homily on Prayer, St. John Chrysostom justly says: “Consider what happiness is conceded, what honor is accorded to thee; to hold speech with God, to have colloquy with Christ in thy prayers, to ask for what thou wishest, to demand what thou desirest.”
It may well be in a given case that God is willing to accord us a certain good if we confidently pray for it. All our entreaties, however, should be inspired by the spirit of the words of Christ on the Mount of Olives: “Nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39).
We, on our part, should pray for what appears desirable to our limited vision; for it is in such prayers of supplication that our confidence in God and our vital contact with Him takes body. Whenever we believe we may without injustice desire a certain thing, we do well to actualize by praying for that thing, showing our dependence on God and our trust in His goodness and His inexhaustible mercy.
Yet, we must not assume that should God’s infinite wisdom decide to withhold that good from us, our prayer has not been received or answered. For the prayer of petition is not a means to secure an object; it is a word addressed to the absolute Person, by which we lay our desires in His hands; and that word retains its meaning even though God answers it in a way different from what we should have preferred. Never must we flinch from believing that God’s answer, whether or not directly favorable, cannot but be an answer of love.
Even our afflictions reflect the infinite mercy of God
It is in a similar light that we must interpret our afflictions. Suppose that a person whom we love dies or that a grave bodily evil befalls us—for example, we lose our eyesight. It is natural and right that we should experience such an event as the misfortune it is, and suffer accordingly; and yet we must not doubt that it, too, harbors some hidden good, because God has willed it to happen; that, even in this affliction, the loving hand of God has touched us.
We must always remain aware of the immeasurable distance between our limited vision, which cannot grasp more than a tiny detail of the whole, and the all-comprehensive mind of God. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord” (Isa. 55:8). Above all, too, we must think of the entirely new meaning that all suffering has acquired through Christ’s death on the cross. The suffering of Our Lord purified the world; His sorrowful love of atonement redeemed it.
Whether the suffering that has fallen to our lot is meant to provide us with an occasion to atone for our sins here on earth; to try us and detach us completely; or again—a costly privilege—to make us atone for the sins of others, or to allow us to participate in Christ’s suffering on the cross, so as to become more like Him; in all suffering we are touched by the merciful hand of God, who is infinite love.
Christian confidence in God implies an integral response to Revelation and therefore an appreciation of the meaning that Christ has conferred upon suffering. Even though his heart be pierced by sorrow, even though he may see nothing but darkness around him, the Christian must still implicitly believe in the supernatural meaning of suffering illumined with the love of God. And so, though we may and should pray for the averting of future evils, to every visitation of sorrow which God has inflicted upon us we must respond with the words Fiat voluntas Dei, (“God’s will be done”); more, we must also see in it the love of God, which purposes to guide us through our sorrows to eternal happiness, to the joy whereof the Lord says, “But your sorrow shall be turned into joy” (John 16:20).
Yet we must oppose evil
However, we hear the objection: “Yes, this may hold inasmuch as sorrows and sufferings alone are concerned. But what if we are to witness the frequent triumphs on earth of willful malice; the reverses not seldom suffered for the cause of God by the soldiers of Christ; the dangers that threaten so many souls owing to the successes of the foes of God? Are we still to interpret these incomprehensible, these strictly and intrinsically bad things as an outcome of God’s love?”
Certainly these things, by contrast to whatever is sad without being evil, must not be interpreted as an expression of God’s will. They are permitted by God; and the fact that God has permitted them to happen must not by any means induce us to doubt their intrinsic badness. Nor does it in any way relieve us of the obligation to combat the power of evil wherever it confronts us. Though God, time and again, permits a temporary triumph of evil, to infer from this that we ought to accept it with resignation would be a fatal misconception. On the contrary, we ate to fight it to the best of out ability; and when we are no longer able to oppose it actively, we should sacrifice and pray that “God may humiliate the enemies of the Church”: “Break, O Lord, we beseech Thee, the pride of our enemies: and with the power of Thy right hand, strike down their insolence” (Prayer against persecutors and foes).
That God sometimes permits evil to triumph does not make that evil into goodness
It would, indeed, be the climax of perversity on our part to construe the fact of the divine permission as meaning that evil triumphant, because it is triumphant, is not merely evil and that it is our duty to find out the good it connotes and appreciate the latter. Then we could not reasonably refuse to find something good also in the conduct of those who crucified Christ. What our confidence in God impels us to believe is merely that God’s permission of an evil thing has its hidden meaning and value; a mysterious truth which does not in any degree diminish or modify the intrinsic evil of that thing—or to put it in different words, the negative value-character inherent in its content. “The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him. But woe to that man by whom the Son of man shall be betrayed. It were better for him, if that man had not been born” (Matt. 26:24).
As for the positive aspect (so far as it is not essentially inaccessible to our understanding), this can reside merely in the indirect consequences of the permission of that evil. In particular, it may be meant as a test for the virtuous. But then this meaning as intended by God engages us precisely to meet the evil thing in question with an adequate response; that is, not to allow our inward rejection of evil or our profession of God and His holy truth to be confounded or bewildered by any success of the evil power; not to let us be bribed by any consideration into a compromise with evil; never to bow to it on account of its display of outward strength.
At the same time, we must be aware that this temporary prevailing of evil, too, carries a certain meaning and value, provided that we give the right response to that call of God which is hidden in the background; that God’s permission of this victory of evil does not signify that He has turned His face from us; and lastly, that the triumph of evil is bound to be a passing one, seeing that we are given the word of promise: “And the gates of hell shall not prevail [against the Church]” (Matt. 16:18).
To be sure, it mostly remains an impenetrable mystery for us why God permits such a passing triumph of evil at all. So much is certain, that this mystery is related to the part God has assigned to man’s freedom of will. But we must not presume to unriddle the secrets of God. Even though we feel tempted to exclaim, “Arise, why sleepest Thou, O Lord!” (Ps. 43:23), our belief in the meaning and value of all divine permissions must remain unshaken. No matter how insoluble the puzzle may appear to our human understanding, even in such moments we must feel secure in the infinite love of God. He who has true confidence in God knows that God has not become indifferent to us because He allows His foes to parade in triumph for a while; he remembers Jesus chiding His disciples when they, frightened by the tempest, awoke him, “Why are you fearful, O ye of little faith?” (Matt. 8:26).
Nor does this right confidence in God, implying the conviction that the victory of evil can never be final, lead to an attitude of quietistic resignation. On the contrary, it supplies us with imperturbable strength in our struggle for the kingdom of God, though sometimes that struggle can no longer consist in anything but prayer and sacrifice, suffering and martyrdom.
We must be confident that God will provide for our needs
As regards the outward concerns of life, in particular, the Gospels again admonish us to put our trust in God. The Lord says: “Behold the birds of the air, for they neither sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into barns: and your heavenly Father feedeth them” (Matt. 6:26). The reference is, above all, to the spirit of poverty. We are warned to preserve our inner freedom, to which our concern about our property may easily become a menace; our attention is drawn to the impossibility of serving two masters. Besides that, however, these words of Christ also exhort us to have confidence in God, to put away that cramped attitude, the anxiety to provide everything one may ever need by one’s own labor and foresight; to avoid being enslaved by our concern and worry even about the real necessities of life: “Be not solicitous, therefore” (Matt. 6:31).
True, we must not, while living idle from sloth or levity, expect God to sustain us. Nor must we expect God to repair by a miracle the damage our unreasonableness and our omissions have inflicted upon us.
Yet, should God excite in us an earnest desire to devote ourselves to some high task, we should follow this call unhampered by any worry about the outward necessities of life and be fully confident that God will take care of what we had to pretermit for the sake of a higher object. The spendthrift who dissipates everything he has for the sake of momentary pleasures must not expect God to dispense him from the consequences of his defects. The generous character, on the other hand, who would give a beggar one half of his cloak as St. Martin did, may confidently speak: “God will provide” (Gen. 22:8). He who has vowed holy poverty shall indeed believe that God, who sent a raven to feed St. Benedict in the hermitage of Subiaco, will provide food and shelter for him.
Or again, if God—without any guilty negligence on our part—imposes the burden of poverty on us, we should not waste ourselves away with care nor feel as though the bottom of our existence had been knocked out; rather—while sparing no effort to provide for our livelihood—we should preserve a deep confidence that God will assist us. We should, in such a case, seek to comprehend the particular call of God to us that lies in this visitation, not allow ourselves to be submerged by our concern for outward necessities. The fact that we have lost the secure natural basis of our outward existence should impel us to throw ourselves entirely upon God’s mercy; notwithstanding all reasonable endeavors to cope with the situation on the natural level, we should firmly resist the tendency to lose heart or to become wholly absorbed in our worries.
Above all, we must always preserve, by our trust in God, our inner freedom to care about the one thing necessary, mindful of the words of the Lord: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his justice: and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33).
Fear is the opposite of confidence in God
There is, further, one current attitude specifically opposed to confidence in God—fear; or, to put it more exactly, the state of the soul abandoning itself to distress and anxiety. There are many things which on the purely natural level are apt to frighten us—grave diseases, for instance, the hostility of wicked and powerful men, the turmoil of battle, the uncontrolled fury of a mob, and last but not least, death itself.
Now it is quite right that we should be aware of the helplessness and insecurity inherent in our earthly situation, rather than indulge—owing to a natural disposition in this sense—the thoughtless illusion of being immune against all evils. Nor should we, in stoical obtuseness, refrain from experiencing as an evil what really is an evil. He who faces death in fearless impassivity, although he does not see in it a gateway to eternity but a submersion beyond which there is nothing but the darkness of utter uncertainty, only proves his dullness or his lack of imagination. His incapacity to understand or to respond to the fact that death really and objectively is a terrible thing, is no display of confidence in God or even an attitude that is praiseworthy on natural grounds.
Confidence in God liberates us from fear
In an entirely different sense, however, does the duty to overcome fear confront the Christian. He must integrally take account of the new light that has fallen upon our earthly situation as a consequence of the Redemption. He knows that the inherent uncertainty and forlornness of our natural situation on earth have been dispelled by Christ, who says: “In the world you shall have distress. But have confidence. I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). In the face of death, he will say with St. Paul, “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). No matter what dangers and menaces may face him, he is aware of their relativity and transitory character, as well as of their character of trial; he feels fully sheltered in the all-powerful love of God, a security which no outward evil can ever destroy.
What confidence in God does to us is not to make us blind either to the evils that threaten us or to the fact of their reality, but to liberate us from the perplexity, unrest, and anxiety linked to them naturally. Confidence in God arms us, then, not with a habit of blunt indifference, but with that supernatural courage which causes us to dread nothing in our struggle for the kingdom of God: that conquering intrepidity which has animated the martyrs.
He who is filled with true confidence in God clings, in the presence of all things that by themselves justly arouse his anxiety, to the supreme reality and the omnipotent love and mercy of God. He never forgets that whatever sufferings and evils he is destined to bear, everything falls beneath the towering reality and the all-wise reign of God, who is infinite love and goodness; that everything is but a phase in the road advancing towards Him; that all dire things are deprived of their venom by Christ, to whom we speak in adoration with St. Francis: “For by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the whole world.”
Why we sometimes succumb to fear
Nevertheless, it is a fact that even convinced Christians, who seek Christ in all sincerity, may sometimes lapse into a state of anxiety which palsies their free response to value. How does this happen?
How does it come about that our souls, even though Christian, may be numbed into a kind of spasm in which they are unable to look at anything except a certain evil, the dread of which fascinates us to the point of caring about nothing but our escape from that evil?
How can we so much fall under the domination of that fear that we stoop to considering everything from this one point of view only? What moved St. Peter to deny the Lord, though only a few hours before he had declared he would follow Him everywhere?
What makes us often, even in the face of minor evils, so preoccupied with the desire of avoiding them as to let this obsession hinder us from responding to high values, so afraid of them as to tell a falsehood or to sin gravely against charity? How is it possible that, having received the message of the Gospels and giving credence to it, we should still tremble sometimes before even comparatively puny evils?
The chief reason lies in our habit of submitting to the sovereignty of a self-evident purpose like that of avoiding an obvious evil, which causes us to omit confronting that evil, taken in its actual content, with God.
We no longer consider the question as to what, after all, it would mean to us if we had to endure that calamity, but formally erect its avoidance into an unequivocal and autonomous aim, to the pursuit of which we then completely subordinate ourselves. Thus, the evil in question acquires an enhanced significance which is out of proportion with its real import.
Mostly, it is a significance that exaggerates the real weight of the matter even in the natural context; always so if the object is viewed in a supernatural light. Anxieties of this kind not seldom afflict us with far heavier distress than would the thing we fear itself, were it really to happen.
We overcome fear by confronting evils with God
From this charmed circle one can only escape by concentrating oneself on God, and confronting the evil one apprehends with God; by contemplating it in the light of our eternal destiny, and repeating the words the Lord spoke: “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39).
To be sure, let us then use all means that reason can provide to avert the threat; but the scope we accord this preoccupation in our minds must be kept in proportion with the true import of that evil. We must never simply deliver ourselves over to the autonomous mechanism of the campaign we wage for averting it. Again and again, in the course of varying situations as our action of defense develops, we must confront the evil in view with God, and renew the act of surrendering ourselves to the holy will of God. Thus only can we avoid being completely dominated by our anxiety and preserve our inner freedom.
In the presence of great tasks, again, to which we feel called by God, we should not rely on a sense of natural security but draw strength and courage from our confidence in God. If we possess all natural equipment needed for these tasks, we should in humility remember the truth that it is to God we owe our natural endowments and that without His help we may fail in spite of all our natural talents.
Moreover, any blessing that may derive from our work either for ourselves or for others depends exclusively on the help of God. And again, if we do not feel equal by nature to the tasks proposed to us, we should by no means lose heart but pray, as we should in the contrary case, too: “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me” (Ps. 69:2). To God’s arms we should repair, and say with the Psalmist, “Through my God I shall climb over a wall” (Ps. 17:30).
Even in inner darkness, we must trust God
The supreme test, however, of our confidence in God lies, perhaps, in those moments of complete inner darkness in which we feel as though we are forsaken by God. Our heart feels blunt; our prayers for strength and inspiration sound hollow; they seem plainly to be of no avail; wherever we look, our glance perceives but our impotence and, as it were, an impenetrable wall separating us from God. We doubt our being called; we appear to ourselves rejected and abandoned by God. It is in such moments, when we are most tempted to part with our confidence in God, that we need it most. An ardent belief in His love; a steadfast conviction that He is near to us even though we are, or imagine ourselves to be, far away from Him; an unbroken awareness that “He hath first loved us, and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10)—these must carry us across the chasms of darkness and lend us strength to blindly let ourselves fall into His arms.
Our confidence in God must be independent of whether we experience His nearness, whether we sense the enlivening touch of grace, whether we feel ourselves being borne on the wings of His love. Has not God too much overwhelmed us with graces to allow us to forget them even for a moment? How could our present aridity obscure the irrevocably valid proofs of God’s grace or make us doubt the primary truth that God has created us and redeemed us out of love and that there is no darkness that cannot be lit up by His light?
Confidence in God is an indispensable condition for our transformation in Christ
We have seen in this chapter that confidence in God constitutes man’s adequate response to the omnipotence, the omniscience and the charity of God, as well as to the merciful word which God has addressed to every one of us. It constitutes our central response to the God of Revelation: the response we owe to Him, together with that of love and adoration. Further, it represents an indispensable condition of our transformation in Christ.
Without confidence in God, neither our readiness to change nor our critical self-knowledge are of any avail; without confidence in God, neither true contrition nor humility are possible.
Without that basic surrender to God which implies a cheerful reliance on Him, we could never advance along the path that leads to those goals. How could we risk that leap in the dark, the act of dying unto ourselves; how should we be ready to lose our souls, unless we knew that we were not to fall into the void but to be received by the mercy of God? How might we even dare to think of putting away the old man and becoming a new man, unless we relied on the message: “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3)? How could we bear the sight of our wretchedness and weakness, and in spite of our ever-recurrent relapses keep out discouragement, unless we were certain that God’s mercy is infinite?—so that we may say with Thomas of Celano (in the Dies Irae): “Thou who hast absolved Mary and granted the thief’s prayer, hast given hope also to me.”
Confidence in God is an essential trait of holiness
Not only is confidence in God a necessary condition of our transformation in Christ; in its perfection it is itself an integrating part thereof, an essential trait of holiness. Complete, unreserved, victorious confidence in God is a fruit of Faith, Hope and Charity. It is a manifest sign of our being dead unto ourselves and living in and from God; a mark of him that has “put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth” (Eph. 4:24). And from confidence in God, again, issue the triumphant freedom of the saint, and the peace of Christ, which the world cannot give us.
But, rudimentary as its initial act must be if compared with its final perfection, confidence in God is what we need as a supreme guide throughout the entire course of life with its turmoils and vicissitudes, its temptations and trials; what we need as a governing faith all along our path, from our first awakening up to the moment when we are summoned to the throne of the Judge Eternal. Confidence in God, directing and shaping our actions, itself growing apace with our transformation; the confidence that makes us speak with the mouth of the Psalmist, “In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be confounded” (Ps. 30:2).