Ordinary Time 6
February 16, 2025
A Tree Planted Beside Running Water
St.
Joseph Cottolengo was an Italian priest from Turin who used to run free
hospitals for the poor in the mid-1800s. Such a work of charity was not without
its challenges, including being perpetually short on money. One day the cook
from the hospital came to him with a small purse, containing a few coins. “Fr.
Cottolengo, this is all the money we have – I cannot buy enough food for the
patients to eat!”
The
priest dumped the coins into his outstretched palm. “Yes, this is indeed far
too little.” With that, he threw the coins out the open window. To the shocked
cook he replied, “Ah, have no fear. The money has been multiplied by our trust
in God – it will bear fruit in a few hours!” Sure enough, before the end of the
day, a woman came to see the saint and donated more than enough money to meet
their needs.
It’s
amazing how unconcerned the saints were with material things, when we so often
spend our days in frantic worry. The economy is rough; I just got a bad
diagnosis; my child won’t talk to me; my dreams are down the tubes. How do we
face these things with the courage and trust of the saints?
Well,
let me ask you a fundamental question: do you believe that God is in control of
your life, or that you are? “Cursed be the man who trusts in human beings,” our
first reading tells us. I am particularly moved by the image in that Jeremiah
passage – imagine in your mind’s eye that tree, planted right next to the
stream, with its roots drinking deeply from the living water. Imagine, now,
that a dry dust storm starts rolling through the field – does the tree fear
this dust storm? Of course not – it has its roots sunk deeply in the water.
Does the tree fear the scorching sun, or a wildfire? Nope, it is deeply rooted
in the life-saving water, so it has nothing to fear.
We worry
about things because we are not yet deeply rooted in Jesus Christ. Most of us
are trying to do this “life” thing on our own efforts, by our own strength.
It’s the American way, right? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work
hard, make something of yourself. But then why does life sometimes seem so
doggone hard?
You may
have heard the saying that “God never gives you more than you can handle.” That
is an absolute lie – God often give us more than we can handle, but He
never gives us more than He can handle. The problem is that we’re trying
to handle it all on our own!
I was
preparing for Mass one day in a former parish when the father of one of our
youth group members came up to me, greatly distress. Through broken English he
tried to tell me that his son Andrew was in the hospital. I was shocked –
Andrew, a healthy high-school junior? I promised him I would visit. So later
that day I went, and found that Andrew was in the psychiatric ward of Stamford
hospital. I went into his room and said, “Andrew, what in the world happened to
you?” And he told me this crazy story:
He had
been sitting around at the lunch table in his public high school, when he
happened to (thoughtlessly) make a joke about a bomb. A teacher overheard and
called the police, who arrested Andrew. Since his parents were illegal
immigrants, they didn’t come to pick him up at the police station, so after
determining he wasn’t a threat, the police sent him to the psych ward of
Stamford hospital.
Needless
to say, he was freaking out about this. Here he was, totally normal, surrounded
by other teens with severe mental illness – he said that the boy one room over
screamed all day and night, and on the other side was a boy who was suicidal.
He was terrified to be there, and even more terrified about the future – would
he be able to get into college? Would this go on his permanent record? Would
his girlfriend break up with him? Would his parents get deported because of
what he said?
Andrew
said that as he was lying there, completely anxious about the future, the
thought occurred to him: “God’s got this.” And he said that an unearthly peace
settled over him from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. God’s got
this. I thought that was the best definition of trust I had ever heard: God’s
got this. And he was able to get out of the hospital a week later and his life
has not been negatively affected.
Really,
if God’s got this, then who cares what happens to us? This is a lens through
which we can read Jesus’ words in the Gospels: blessed are the poor? Hungry?
Weeping? Hated? Well, if God’s got this, if He really is in control of our life
and destiny, then who cares if we are poor, hungry, weeping, or hated – so long
as we love God and are loved by Him? St. Ignatius of Loyola speaks about a
“holy indifference” – we should be so rooted in God that all of those other
things – wealth or poverty, abundance or hunger, sorrow or joy, praise or
criticism – are unimportant. As Mother Teresa said, “If you are humble nothing
will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.” In
other words, if you are deeply rooted in God – you find your identity in Him,
you have surrendered your life to Him, you trust that He is truly in control of
your life – then nothing will ever bother you. Poverty becomes a way to detach
yourself from earthly goods and focus on heavenly ones. Suffering becomes a
forge to fashion the deepest virtues in you. Sorrow will make us long for our
true home. Being rejected helps us to remember that only God’s love is secure.
Many of
you know Fr. Walter Cizek, the American priest who spent 23 years in Russian
prison camps. Five of those years were spent in solitary confinement in the
infamous Lubyanka prison, confined to four white walls for years on end, only
broken by periodic interrogations. It was enough to drive a man insane. But in
that dark place, he began to become more deeply rooted in God. He began to pray
the Mass from memory, recite as much of the Bible as he could remember,
interceded for the world and for Russia, and spend his days in intimate union
with God. At first, he desperately wished he could be somewhere else – “Oh, I
could do so much more for God if I was a priest in active ministry!” – but over
time he began to realize that he was exactly where he was meant to be – he
could please God right there, in solitary confinement. He was fulfilling God’s
will – and that brought him peace.
He later
wrote these lines about his time in prison: “What [God] wanted was for me to
accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place
myself entirely at his disposal. He was asking of me an act of total trust,
allowing for no interference or restless striving on my part, no reservations,
no exceptions, no areas where I could set conditions or seem to hesitate. He
was asking a complete gift of self, nothing held back.”
Blessed
is he who trusts in God with his entire life.
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