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!” 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. Our faith, at its core, invites trust, and not just abstract trust, the belief that good is stronger than evil. No. To say the creed, to say that I believe in God is to have 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. When we anxiously worry, in essence, we are denying the Christian creed because we are, in effect, saying that God has either forgotten about us or that God does not have the power to do anything about what is troubling us. It is then that we, like Martha, begin rushing around and fretting about many things. We see the opposite of this in Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. He truly says the creed. With all the powers of death and darkness closing in on him, just when it seems that God has abandoned him and the earth, he begins his prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.” What Jesus is saying is that, despite indications to the contrary, despite the fact that it looks like God is asleep at the switch, God is still in charge, is still Lord of this universe, is still noticing everything, and is still fully in power and worthy of trust. 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 often we 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 of our radar screens. 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.[1]
[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Way of Trust” September 1997.