F.U.N. (Faith Up Now) : iMazement!

With only about a little over a month before the end of the Year of Faith, we ask how to end it with a twang? There were and will surely be many more initiatives throughout the universal Church, but what truly counts is how we have –through a conscious and sincere effort– rediscovered precious points in our faith and have yielded fruits through them in ourselves and others.

It is always so tempting to think of something BIG or EXTRAordinary. We, however, know what really counts before God whether BIG or SMALL, ordinary or extraordinary, seen or unseen, etc., is the uprightness of one’s intention to do everything for His glory. Thus, the ‘twangs’ are as many as there are individuals who offer to their Father God the best that they could be where God has called them.

This is, in fact, how every person can be an ‘amazement’ for God. Our Lord Himself, witnessing the faith of the Centurion, marveled and said, “Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” Our Lord also praised other individuals like the woman with a hemorrhage who was cured by simply touching the fringe of Jesus’ garments, or the woman who put in all her money into the treasury.

God’s amazement at man is mysteriously rooted in that every person is created unique. Saint Athanasius, a Father of the Church, already expressed this when he said: “that man is the only creature that God created for himself.” In these terms, he wished to say that every human being who comes to existence is the only kind of himself in the whole world. He is irreplaceable, inalienable, and is uniquely and intimately loved by God as though ‘he were the only one that ever existed.’

Inspiring as this may all be for our spiritual life and daily struggles, it is unfortunate that man today isn’t as amazed with God as God is with man. This is something that Eugene Zolli, once chief Rabbi of the Synagogue in Rome, described his experience of being gradually drawn by God from his Jewish faith which later blossomed into the Catholic faith.

In the midst of his internal restlessness to find out what God wanted of him, Eugene came upon a “double file of people standing in the rain, waiting for the doors of a second-class movie theater to open.”

“Look,” Zolli told himself, “these poor people have worked steadily for six days, and today they are waiting in the rain to give away part of the fruit of their labor. They are good people, but they feel the monotony and the emptiness of life and look for some diversion. They want to live an hour or two in the illusion of sharing, in thought, some adventure of love or comic interlude, some thrilling escapade or mystery.” (Before the Dawn)

In contrast, Eugene considered himself in an entirely different sphere. He continued: “Further along the street was a little church, silent and empty. There I stood in the rain, under a gray sky, waiting for God’s door. I felt, and those people did too, that we should plunge deeper into life, into a fuller, richer life, rich in personal experience.” (ibid.)

Zolli’s simple but powerful experience reveals how we could be either those who are no longer amazed with God and hope for something amazing in what the world may offer, or to be amazed at what God has to offer us even though humanly it may be devoid of anything humanly attractive or fulfilling.

Isn’t this the reason that people today pray less, shun suffering in all its forms except those which give some vain personal benefit, find it difficult to build on lasting relationships founded on sincere virtues. When man seizes to be amazed at God, then there is nothing –if at all, only apparently, the material goods of this life– that can put man’s heart to rest.

Let us decisively abandon the line of those people standing under the rain, who are satisfied with enjoying one transient ‘second-class’ amazement only to be superseded by another less uplifting. Rather, let us stand firmly before God and allow His goodness and mercy to amaze us anew.

Chevrot, in his powerful commentary on the prodigal son shares a very striking point: “We have the power to make God happy!” He writes, “The prodigal [son] never thought how happy he was going to make his father. And we too forget that God is happy when he sees us coming toward him. It’s unbelievable, I grant you. We could never have known this truth if the Son of God had not come down from Heaven to tell us so. But he has told us: ‘My father loves you.’”

“When you make the Sign of the Cross in the morning, when you kneel down at night, when you lift up your thoughts to him in the midst of the day’s occupations, when you make a detour to go into a church and pray for a while… every time you do these things, you are making him happy. His child is not lost, his child is not dead, his child is still with him.”

It is then that we feel an inner confidence and strength, because we know ourselves to be God’s faithful children who mysteriously fill Him with joyful amazement.