So Hard to Trust

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Like many families during this pandemic, my wife, Amparo, and I have had many Facetime sessions with our children and grandchildren.

In one recent session, our grandchild, Leo, who is a year old, confidently falls backward into the arms of his mother while laughing uncontrollably. We all have seen this behavior in children, and it occurs to me that it is almost a perfect analogy for a joyful, trusting relationship to God.

In a blog in 2014, I cited an article in America Magazine about atheist Richard Dawkins’ book, “The God Delusion,” and how he delights in mocking and baiting believers. His taunts, I wrote, should make us think about what we believe, why we believe it and how weird it may be to “the world.” And, we should recall the nature of faith itself.

Faith's Primary Meaning
The author of the America article, Stephen Bullivant, a lecturer in theology at St. Mary’s University College in London, reminded readers that faith’s primary meaning is “trust.”

I wrote in that blog that “we are creatures of limited understanding of ourselves, others and the world around us. To survive as human beings, we need to trust – first, our parents and family members, then other people, then God. We have good reason to trust God, though perhaps not the kind of reason that will satisfy the Dawkinses of this world.

So whom do we trust that leads us to God? Here’s what I wrote back then.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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“We trust the likes of Moses, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Buber, Oscar Cullman, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Pope Francis, and our parents and grandparents and ancestors who were believers. And we Christians trust Jesus of Nazareth.

“And though we believe in evolution, we trust there is more behind what we see of this remarkable, unimaginable universe than sheer randomness. While we may not be able to scientifically prove God’s existence (and if we did, say some theologians, it wouldn’t really be God), there’s no proof God doesn’t exist.” There are good reasons to believe.

So if trust is warranted, why is it so hard?

Because we humans are sentient creatures who need to "see to believe," and for most of us most of the time, God is hidden. In this world, as St. Paul wrote in a letter to the Christians at Corinth, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” Trust requires faith and vice versa.    

In a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter, Patrick Reardon writes about the suicide of his older brother, David, and the pain, grief and sorrow it caused. “And in that pain,” he wrote, “I saw – I realized – that God was there. I’m not talking about a voice from heaven or a vision or a cooling breeze. I’m talking about that God was there, somehow, in the ripped and jagged, raw agony of facing these unfaceable experiences.”

Leap Into the Unknown
Subsequently, Reardon came to believe that “this is where God is and demands that I go – that I leap into this unknown.” He recalls Jesus’ struggle with trust on the cross when he went from “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” to “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

And he uses the same analogy, that Jesus’ trust of the Father is like that of a toddler who jumps from a couch into the arms of his mother. Even though adults – who often think we’re filled with knowledge and wisdom - we are like toddlers in that we have few certain answers to important questions about life.

“I don’t know why I will live my entire life only to die,” Reardon writes. “And I don’t know why David killed himself.

“I know, though, that I’m offered the choice to commend myself to God, to trust God, and to feel in some way that, at each dark moment, God is there with me in a way I don’t understand and can’t understand.

“I have come to find that, like a toddler, I have to jump. So I do.”