Being home with my parents started off pretty nice in August. I got to rest from have a busy last semester of college not just with student teaching, but also with figuring out the transition from distance to in person learning with my co-teachers. I got to enjoy being outside in the nice weather without worrying about where I had to be next. I got to go to daily Mass pretty easily, and I was wanting to organize a retreat-like environment for myself at home.
Then all of the rest turned into laziness, the nice weather turned to rain, and my prayer lost its fervor. I was sleeping away every morning because I had no plan for the day, taking a nap in the afternoon as an escape, and wasting my waking hours on the world in my phone. I stopped going to daily Mass, and I no longer had the motivation to pray a rosary. As I would leave my room less, I wasn’t talking with my parents, which increased my sense of loneliness. My life felt empty, still, and silent.
It is hard to have faith in a person who is silent. It is hard to have hope that they will do what they said they were going to do when nothing is moving.
As weeks turned into months, it seemed like things only got worse. The emptiness became desolation when my friends from St. Thomas stopped being responsive and my sisters got busier with the progressing academic year. I felt stuck in stillness when I couldn’t find any good fruit from my time at home–my mother just got angrier, my father was more closed-off, and no amount of praying had caused the preclearance process to move any faster. I poured my whole heart out to God in the silence, and nothing changed. Where was He, and if He was still with me, why wasn’t He doing anything? Does He not care that I am hurting?
I blamed myself for spending the summer doing Totus Tuus, a program where a team of four missionaries put on week-long summer catechetical camps for grade school students at different parishes. I thought that if I would not have done it, I would be in Ireland by now. If I would not have Totus Tuus, I wouldn’t have met someone incredible on my team that I was really missing, which only added to the loneliness. Maybe I don’t actually know anything about God’s will. Maybe I don’t actually know anything about God.
Then, I got to visit my older sister, Elizabeth, at the end of September. After we cried together, she directed me toward a podcast episode that talked about hope. In the podcast, the speaker says that in order to have true, Christian hope, we have to be persistent. This means that we may need to war with God over our requests. The speaker said this shows itself by not killing off our desires because they seem to not be working out or even be unrealistic. One example of this would be Saint Monica, the mother of my dear brother in heaven, Saint Augustine. She continued to hope in her son’s conversion and relationship with Christ even though he was in a life of dissipation with seemingly no end in sight. She kept the desire for her son’s salvation alive, even though it seemed unrealistic, and warred with God until it happened. The speaker continued saying to hope in Christ is to remember that Jesus did the most unrealistic thing imaginable: He rose from the dead. We remember the resurrection not just in our hope for heaven, but in our hope that God can do all things, which manifests in our desire for God to do good, no great things for us.
I think of a line from my favorite psalm, psalm 36. It says, “Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.” To war with God because of a desire that has not yet been fulfilled is to seek Him out. To hope brings us to Christ, which will lead us towards perfect union with Him, who is all good. I will keep hoping for a quick end to the loneliness and an end to the waiting, even if it seems impossible right now. As the reading from Mark’s gospel from this weekend says, “All things are possible for God.” If I have faith that this is true, then I can hope for all things.
There are some good things coming within these next few weeks that the Lord has given me, which helps me to keep my faith in Him. One of my professors said from one of my Catholic Studies classes at St. Thomas said something along the lines of, “Since we are sensual beings, the Lord works through our senses to reach us. He does this by giving us tangible signs and revelations of Himself, which we can then remember when our faith is tried and tested.” These good things are signs that the Lord is still here and is still attentive to the desires on my heart. I get to go to St. Thomas and visit my friends who are still in school this coming weekend, and both of my sisters are coming home the following weekend. If I have reason for faith with these signs and past signs and revelations, then I also have reason for hope.
