Trusting God's Mercy Through Grief

Lord let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you. Psalm 33:22

This is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. In the fall of 2009, I was the Director of the Men’s ACTS Retreat at St. Mary’s in West. This psalm was the Responsorial Psalm at the return Mass, and I chose it as the retreat theme. Since that time, it has become a very important part of my life. I say it every day, usually several times, and since that retreat, I have placed it at the bottom of every email I’ve sent.

Our son Justin had passed away on January 19, 2007. He was 18 years old and had fought cancer since he was 8.  My wife Carolyn and I were still struggling in 2009 when I directed the retreat. This psalm, by God’s grace, helped us to recognize that the Lord was the only one who could bring us through such a tragedy. It helped us see that there was a choice to make: place our trust in the Lord and let his love and mercy heal us, or blame God, reject him, and try to push through the pain our way. There was no middle ground. We were either all in with God, or all out. Fortunately for us, rejecting God was not an option, so we chose to let him into the pain and we placed our trust in him. In all honesty, the decision to surrender ourselves to God’s mercy and love was made for a somewhat selfish reason. We did it for survival.  

Before this, we were trying to do as St. Paul said: “We were striving eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts.”  We were striving to get closer to God. While this helped, it seemed that in many ways, it was more about us and what we were doing than about God.  It wasn’t until we surrendered to God’s love and let him do the healing, let him do the work in our hearts, that we actually found healing. God truly showed us a more excellent way. 

“So faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”  We found this scripture verse to be true because we lived it.  Even in the darkest hours of our grief, we still had faith and hope in God, but we didn’t find healing until we surrendered ourselves to him, body, mind, and soul, and allowed him to embrace us with his love.  
  
Lord let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus gave us a new commandment, He said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”  St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians also gives us a great description of the way God loves and calls us to love him and one another. Among other things, he says, “Love is patent, love is kind. It is not jealous, love is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”

While this is a great description of love, it’s much more than just a description. It’s a standard, a measuring stick that we should use to evaluate how well we are progressing in loving as God does.  I am sorry to say that in reading this and St. Paul’s entire message, I’m reminded of how often I fail to love as I should.  I am reminded that loving like God does not require us to check off all the items on the list. It requires a life of surrender and humility. It requires us to take up our cross and follow the Lord.  It requires us to take a good look in the mirror and do a good Examination of Conscience regularly to ensure that we are truly moving closer to God and not stagnant in our relationship with him or, even worse, moving farther away. 

There’s a quote from Catholic priest and writer Thomas Merton that I think does a great job of summing up today’s message.   

He wrote, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore, I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the showdown of death.  I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and in your love will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

Amen