A PRIEST flew thousands of miles to spend a month with the community of Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India. He was in a stage of discernment for God’s further purpose in his priestly life. On the first morning that he met Mother Teresa, the pious nun asked him, “What do you want me to pray for you?” The priest answered, “Pray that I have clarity.”
She said no. That was that.
Then the priest asked why she announced that clarity was the last thing he was clinging to and had to let go.
“But Mother,“ he explained, “you had always seemed to have the clarity I longed.
Mother Teresa laughed and answered, “I have never had clarity; what I’ve always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust.”
Mother Teresa, now a canonized saint, is right. Many times what we need is the grace to trust because there are a lot of things that we are unsure of in this life and that we can never see clearly. We need faith because, as St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1)
In the Gospel this Sunday, we find the deep faith of Canaanite woman, who, in the eyes of the Jewish people of her time, was at a disadvantaged position when she asked Jesus to heal her daughter, who was tormented by a demon. First, she was a Gentilefrom pagan inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon, who did not belong to the “chosen race.” Second, as a woman of her time, she didn’t have much influence on society.
However, Jesus admired her faith in beating all odds, just to make her possessed daughter become well. When Jesus told her, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dog,” she responded, “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”
Her comments moved Jesus’ heart that Jesus told her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”
Indeed, faith is the “inexhaustible treasure” we need to carry in our journeys of life. Many of us possess a lot of treasures, such as money, properties, knowledge, and skills. These are good, but they do not last. What God offers us is the infinite treasure of faith and life in his bosom.
For us Christians, faith comes from the grace of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ. It’s is the reason that St. Paul wrote in Second Letter to Timothy (3:14-4:2): “Remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.”
St. Paul also reminds us to be “persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient.” It implies perseverance and strong faith in God despite our struggles, difficulties, and confusion.
Psalm 121 expresses this treasure of persistent faith:
“The Lord is your guardian; the Lord is your shade; he is beside you at your right hand.
The sun shall not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord will guard you against all evil; he will guard your life. The Lord will guard your coming and your going, both now and forever.”
May we take the advice of St. Teresa of Calcutta to pray for trust in God all the days of life!
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Fr. Rodel “Odey” Balagtas is the pastor of Incarnation Church in Glendale, California.
