Where do you place your faith today? To whom do you look for hope?
If you’re like me, you sometimes place your hope on others we see doing good deeds in our world.
We hope in global leaders who look good, appear to be honest and say the right things. We have hope in our religious leaders, the shepherds of our flock, who lead us in prayers and take the place of Christ at certain moments of Liturgy and Sacrament.
We also place our hopes in cultural icons who sing the right kind of music (according to our ears) or who make the right kind of movies and say the right kind of things in the media. And, finally, we place our hope on our own mothers, fathers and extended family members who always seem to have it together.
But then …
Well, you know what usually happens. They slip up. They are caught doing something bad. They are exposed as hypocrites. They say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong audience.
The downfall begins … and these days it happens rapidly, thanks to our Twitter-crazy world of social media, where millions of people seem to be anxiously awaiting the next failure to be exposed so they can have 15 seconds of laughter at the comeuppance that is surely to happen soon.
That’s what happens when you’re human. You make mistakes. It’s what we do.
And that is why it is foolish to place our faith squarely and solely on other human beings and their philosophies.
Our readings today help illustrate this point. In the first reading, we read of Jacob and his dream of a stairway to heaven – a connection to God – which leads to a repeat of God’s promises that he first made to Abraham. Jacob makes a conscience decision to place his faith in God and not others (or himself).
In the Gospel, we recount the story of the bleeding woman who has heard of Christ the healer and has come to believe that He has the power to grant God’s healing powers. Even if she did not understand all that there was to know about Jesus (and really, are we not all in that same boat?), she still reached out to touch his cloak as he walked by – knowing that she would be healed.
Ah, but it wasn’t the cloak itself. It was the faith she had that saved her. Just as it is not the Rosary that we hold in our hands that saves us, it’s the meditations we ponder and the prayers we say for Mary’s intercession … and the faith we have that she will listen and help us draw nearer to her Son.
Catholics are often taken to task for filling our worship spaces with statues, stained glass windows, Stations of the Cross and the Crucifix (as opposed to a simple cross). “Idolatry” they say.
But what some don’t understand is that those pieces by themselves – including the relics we have in our altars – are not the source of power. Never have been. It’s always been the faith that we have that these sacred treasures of our shared history can help us draw closer to Christ.
The Crucifix and Stations of the Cross remind us how Christ died for our sins and that we must also accept the sufferings and pains in our own lives in order to follow him to that stairway to heaven. The statues of the saints and the relics they leave behind are reminders that these saints – these HUMAN saints – were just like us, but were also extraordinary in their faith, often against great odds, and should serve as models for our own behavior and life choices.
In our first reading, Jacob takes the rock that he had used as a pillow to set up a “memorial stone” and drench it with oil to mark this as the site where his faith in God became solid as a rock. But it wasn’t the rock itself, it was the faith and the subsequent actions of Jacob that carried him to his reward.
These days we have our churches, our cathedrals, our Eucharistic adoration chapels … even many beautiful cemeteries … where we pray for peace, pray for happiness and for each other. But we all know it’s not about the building in which we pray. It’s about our prayers and our hearts and where we direct our faith.
In a noisy scene, the Gospel shows us a woman reaching out, grasping for the Lord’s attention. In a similar way, in our noisy world today, we have many who are reaching out for the Lord’s attention.
Where will they find Him? Perhaps they will catch a glimpse of God in us? Perhaps a good deed, an act of true charity or maybe just a smile will change the disposition of that person desperate for answers. Perhaps by our actions, they will take a step toward drawing closer to God and the peace and salvation He offers and they so badly need.
Always be ready to imitate the cloak of Jesus.
Pray that our Lord will use us to extend his healing graces to others … not in a perfect way (see above … we are still human) but in a way that will help bring about the kingdom of heaven, here on earth.
As a writer, I often pray that God makes me his perfect pencil.
Although I sometimes push too hard and break the tip of the pencil, I never give up trying to follow His will and – I pray – I will never lose the faith that I have that He will answer my prayers and guide my feet (and my fingers).
