Then Jesus told [Thomas], “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” – John 20.29
I recently finished reading Rosemary Mahoney’s, The Singular Pilgrim. She tells of pilgrimages she made to holy sites in England, France, Israel and elsewhere. She is not particularly religious. She frequently shares her doubts about one part or another of the Christian faith as she writes. But she grew up a Roman Catholic and is still respectful because her mother is a strong and sincere Catholic. Her mother is also confined to a wheelchair because of childhood polio.
Mahoney went to Lourdes, France, where she visited the famous grotto of Bernadette’s vision of the Virgin Mary. People from all over the world go to Lourdes to pray, to be healed, or to represent loved ones who need healing. Even though Mahoney was not personally convinced of the miraculous character of the water of Lourdes, she still sent a small vial of it back home to her religious mother.
When she returned from France, she visited her mom and asked if she did anything with the water. Her mother said that she applied it to her leg just as she had been told. “And what happened?” she asked her mother who was sitting in her wheelchair. “I flew up the chimney,” she said dryly. “What really happened?” Rosemary tried again. Her mom said, “Do you think, Rose, that if something had happened, I’d be sitting here in this chair right now?”
Mother and daughter talked a while longer and wondered aloud about the mysteries of life: why her mother wasn’t healed, why she got polio as a child, why her mother’s two sisters who also got polio died and she survived.
“Was it God who saved you?” Rosemary asked her mom. “I can’t answer that,” she said. “I don’t know if he involves himself so minutely. But I do believe that God is love. And when I get into bed at night my last thought is a prayer. I say to God, ‘See me, hear me, know that I am here.’”
“Do you think he sees you?” Rosemary asked. She answered quickly, “Without question.”
Mahoney then writes, “My mother’s future has grown short; a cure at this late date would probably not change many things for her, and she seems now to have little interest in one. She, who is fond of quoting Jesus’ phrase, ‘Where there is love, there also is your treasure,’ has found her health elsewhere.” (72-73)
It’s a kind of faith, a health that is rare even among those who call themselves faithful, a conviction that God is always good even though life is not. It reminds me what I once heard the Christian psychologist, Larry Crabb, say about suffering and disappointments in the Christian life.
“What is God up to when sorrow comes, when prayers don’t get answered, when the abundant life is abundantly unfulfilling?” he asked aloud. “What is God trying to do?” And then he answered: “I think what God is trying to do is to make people who will trust him in the absence of blessings.”
When the sun goes down and we put our heads upon our pillows at the end of the day, it is enough to pray, “See me, hear me, know that I am here.”
— KDS
Thoughts Along the Way 