Pints With Aquinas - Why Suffering is MERCY | Mthr. Natalia

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

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Glory to Jesus Christ. I'm Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Catholic nun from Christ the Bridegroom Monastery, and this is Pines with Aquinas. Several years ago, I was at a funeral, and it was the funeral of a teenage boy who had died just extremely tragically and up to that point I had never before experienced such grief and, you know, in seeing the reactions of his family members. And I don't think I've actually seen such grief since then either. So as we're at the funeral, it comes time for the homily. And I remember sitting there thinking, what do you say?

What can you possibly say in this situation to bring any sort of comfort to this family? And I had never been so grateful to not be a priest because I was like, I just, I don't even know what I would say in this moment. And my only comfort, excuse me, my only comfort was that this priest is one of the best homilists I know. So I was like, whatever he's going to say, this is it. This is perfect. So he starts his homily, and he says,

God is not compassionate, and God is not merciful. And I think he's lost it. He cracked under the pressure and because whatever you're supposed to say in that situation, that is not it. And then he pauses and he says God is mercy and God is compassion. God can't not be merciful. He can't not be compassionate. And I think we have this problem of, we think that things like mercy and compassion are just attributes of God. But they're not just attributes, they're not just characteristics, they're who He is. He can't be otherwise. You know, we can say God is loving, but that's not the fullness, because God is love. And it's a good reminder because we don't really understand what mercy and compassion look like.

So we need to remember, remind ourselves that whatever is happening right now, however God is acting in my life, whatever is happening right now, however God is acting in my life, He's acting in mercy, regardless of whether or not it seems like that to us, because He can't be otherwise. I had a really tangible experience of this that I'd like to pretty vulnerably share with all of you this past year. So there's a particular thing in my life that for many, many years had just been plaguing me. It was my proverbial thorn in the flesh. And I prayed for so many years for this to go away. And we all have these things, right?

We have particular patterns of thought that we don't want to have this pattern of thought, or we have this particular habitual action, this I do what I do not wish to do. And it seems like a good prayer to ask God to remove those things from us. So for so many years, I was asking for this thing to be removed. And it was very much, it was externals, right?

It was a particular action. It was a thought process that to some degree was still an external. It was still kind of a result of something. And I just didn't want these anymore. And for years and years I begged for God to take them away. And then this past year it kind of finally came to a head because as I was praying for these things to be taken away, I realized that I was starting to get really angry at God for not taking them away. And then I was praying with a passage from the fifth chapter of Luke.

This is starting with verse 12. It happened when he, meaning Jesus, was in a certain city that behold a man who was full of leprosy saw Jesus, and he fell on his face and implored him, saying, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. Then he put out his hand and touched him, saying, I am willing, be cleansed. Immediately the leprosy left him. And when I prayed with this, I was so angry. I was so angry at the Lord because it felt like he wasn't doing this for me. And my prayer, quite frankly, was, I'm your bride. If you are willing, you can make me clean and you choose not to. Why don't you want your bride to be clean. And that was it. That was the prayer. And I was so angry, but I moved on with life. And then a couple weeks later, no, a couple months later, I had forgotten this prayer. And I was on retreat and on this particular retreat there was some really

deep healing of shame that I've been living with for many years that I didn't know was there. And I had just never experienced such freedom in really in my whole life since maybe I was a child. And there was so much freedom and so much healing from shame. And then a couple of weeks later, it suddenly hit me. This thing that I've been praying for so many years for the Lord to take away, it was gone. I didn't even notice it leaving. I hadn't prayed anymore for Him to take it away.

It was just gone in a completely miraculous way. And I just started to weep because I realized that this thought process, this way of thinking that I wanted him to take away that I knew was destructive was not actually what needed healed. It was the symptom of this deep shame that I was feeling. And as I wept in gratitude, I just thanked the Lord that in His mercy, He didn't take away the thing that I was asking Him to. Because it was a good thing, right? It's good to want him to take away this destructive thought habit.

And which of us wouldn't give that healing to someone that we loved if it was in our power? If you love someone so deeply and they come to you in suffering and ask you to take away this destructive thing in their life and you have the power to do it, of course you would do it. So we

can't understand how it would be mercy to not. This was absolutely the Lord's mercy. Because I realized I wasn't asking Him to take away my leprosy. I was asking Him to take away the spots of leprosy and to keep the disease there because I didn't know there was a deeper disease. You know, it's like the story I shared in last week's episode about the cramping in

the side and the story of the prodigal son. It's that the Lord allows these things to happen in our life, not because He's angry and wants to punish us, but because He wants deeper healing. He doesn't want to just give us what we're asking for if what we're asking for isn't good. And it seems good to us because we can't see the whole picture. Archbishop Raya, who was the Archbishop Joseph Raya, he was the Melkite Catholic Archbishop of Galilee. And he says in this very simple sentence, the mercy of God is the transforming presence of God Himself.

Mercy doesn't just mean taking away whatever hurts. Mercy doesn't just mean giving whatever is asked for, even if it seems good. Mercy means being in the presence of God and being transformed. So we have to trust that whatever is happening as we're in the presence of God is mercy and that we are being transformed. There's another quote that's from, well, it's in the first volume of the Philokalia and St. Nicodemus attributes it to Anthony the Great, but other scholars think that it's probably not even a Christian writing. It's probably from Stoics. But regardless, I think it's a helpful quote, and it's a good reminder. It says,

It is absurd to be grateful to doctors who give us bitter and unpleasant medicines to cure our bodies, and yet to be ungrateful to God for what appears to us to be harsh, not grasping that all we encounter is for our benefit and in accordance with His providence. The medicine can taste so bitter and unpleasant, and it doesn't even necessarily seem like medicine. How can it possibly be mercy when a young father dies and leaves a widow with five small children? How can it possibly be mercy when there is a toddler who's been diagnosed with cancer? But somehow we have to trust that because God is mercy, that when He is allowing something, He is also transforming us in it. And this doesn't mean that the evil is from God, right?

Because evil is not of God. But it means that God can enter even into the midst of the evil and transform there. Because God uses all for good for those who love Him, even sin. In the divine liturgy in our Eastern Christian churches, every time we make a petition asking the Lord for something, the response of the people is, Lord have mercy. And this really is kind of a prayer of just, Lord do what you do. Because again, He is mercy. Asking Him to have mercy is just asking Him to just be Him. And that means that when we're asking for something, when we're asking for seasonable

weather in the liturgy and we say, Lord have mercy, that means give us what we need even when we don't know what we need. So I just want to pray that we can all have a greater openness to what the mercy of God looks like. And then next week I'll talk about compassion. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for those who are listening.

Thank you for the gift of my vocation. Thank you for all of the ways that you are merciful in my life. The ways that you show your mercy. You show your very being to myself and to all those who are listening to this. I want to thank you especially for those times that you show us your mercy that we don't thank you for because it doesn't look like mercy. Father I ask that you heal the leprosy within each of us. Don't just take away the spots of leprosy, but really heal the root of our diseases,

the root of our sicknesses, ears to hear, that we may know your truth and your goodness. I ask this through the prayers of St. Nathaniel, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John Paul II, through the prayers of Saint Anthony the Great, the Most Holy Theotokos, and all the saints, and through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.