“You lament the world’s hardness of heart, and you are correct there too. However, what I don’t hear in all this are many words about the Lordship of Jesus. We talk as if we need to save the world as if everything depends on us. Well, it doesn’t. In the resurrection of Jesus, the world is already saved; the powers of death and darkness have already been vanquished. We only need to live in such a way so as to show that world that we believe this” – William Stringfellow.
Fr. Rolheiser writes that Stringfellow was telling us what Jesus tried to teach, namely, that the opposite of faith is not so much unbelief and doubt in the existence of God as it is anxiety and fretless worry. The opposite of faith is what Jesus cautions Martha against: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things!” We are not to be anxious about many things. Jesus keeps telling us not to worry and to trust that we are always in good hands. A gracious, all-powerful, loving God is solidly in charge, and nothing will happen in the world, and nothing will happen to us that this Lord is indifferent to. At its core, our faith invites trust, not just abstract trust, and the belief that good is stronger than evil. No. To say the creed, to say that I believe in God with a very particularized, concrete trust, a trust that God has not forgotten about me and my problems and that, despite whatever indications there are to the contrary, God is still in charge and is very concerned with my life and its concrete troubles. The trouble, though, is that this is hard to do, even when we do believe in a God who is Lord of the universe. Our problem is that we project our limited, selective care onto this God. We feel that God is inadequate because we often are, that God falls asleep at the switch because we occasionally do and that God forgets about us in our problems because we have a habit of letting certain persons and things slip off our radar screens. Things slip our minds. Our capacity to care is limited and selective. Were we Lord of the universe, many a sparrow would be forgotten, and many a hair would fall to the ground unnoticed. And so we fear that God sometimes forgets and does not notice us, that God, like us, is an inadequate Lord of the universe. That is why we get anxious and fret; like one without faith, we can feel that we are in an unfeeling universe. Help us, Lord, to trust in you in all things and all ways.