Today, we read in Mark’s Gospel of the synagogue official Jairus falling at the feet of Jesus, pleading earnestly with him, saying, “My daughter is at the point of death. Please, come lay your hands on her so that she may get well and live.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that sometimes we can be very naïve about faith and its dynamics, thinking that faith in God is a ticket to earthly peace and joy. But faith isn’t a path to easy calm, nor does it assure us that we will exit this life in calm, and that can be pretty unsettling and perplexing at times. Henri Nouwen received a call that his mother was dying back home in the Netherlands. On his flight home from New York to Amsterdam, he reflected on his mother’s faith and virtue and concluded that she was the most Christian woman he had ever known. With that as a wonderfully consoling thought, he fantasized about how she would die, how her last hours would be filled with faith and calm, and how that faith and calm would be her final, faith-filled witness to her family. But that’s not the way it played out. Far from being calm and unafraid, his mother, in the final hours leading up to her death, was seemingly in the grip of some inexplicable darkness, of some deep inner disquiet, and of something that looked like the antithesis of faith. Why would his mother undergo this disquiet when she had been a woman of such strong faith for all her life? Initially, this unsettled him deeply until a deeper understanding of faith broke through: His mother had been a woman who, every day of her adult life, had prayed to Jesus, asking him to empower her to live as he lived and to die as he died. Well, seemingly, her prayer was heard. She did die like Jesus, who, though having a rock-solid faith, sweated blood while contemplating his own death and then cried out on the cross, anguished with the feeling that God had forsaken him. In brief, her prayer had been answered. She had asked Jesus to let her die as he did, and, given her openness to it, her prayer was granted to the confusion of her family and friends, who had expected a very different scene. That is also true for the manner of Jesus’ death and the reaction of his family and disciples. This isn’t the way anyone naturally fantasizes the death of a faith-filled person. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross submits that each of us goes through five clear stages in dying, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kathleen Dowling Singh suggests that what Kubler-Ross defines as acceptance needs some further nuance. According to Singh, the toughest part of that acceptance is full surrender and, prior to that surrender, some people, though not everyone, will undergo a deep interior darkness that, on the surface, can look like despair. Only after that, do they experience joy and ecstasy. All of us need to learn the lesson that Nouwen learned at his mother’s deathbed: Faith, like love, admits of various modalities and may not be judged simplistically from the outside.