Healing of the lunatic child

9 April 1978

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Who of us could claim that he is not like the father of the little lunatic child about whom we have heard in the Gospel today, of a divided heart when we come to God, like him, either explicitly or implicitly somewhere deep down in our heart and our wavering mind; we say like him: if Thou canst, do something, have mercy, and help. Few are those who would come to God and say: I know for sure that all things are possible unto Thee, and therefore I commit myself, unreservedly, unhesitatingly to Thy care and whatever happens I shall receive from Thee as an act divine, true and right. ‘If Thou canst, do something, have compassion and save my child’. And the Lord answers so humbly and so openly also, He says words which are perhaps more expressive that those we heard today in the authorised version; the original says ‘If thou canst believe however little, all things are possible to faith’. And ‘however little’ is something which each of us can afford, because to believe means first and foremost almost entirely to trust, to trust God, to trust the people who love us; and this, to however small a degree, we all do and we all can. Yet it is not all there is to be done; to the extent to which we trust, we must be prepared to let go of our own strength, of our own efforts. When we trust someone when we are ill, when we trust someone to heal us, we commit ourselves into the hand of this person, a nurse, a doctor, and leave it to her, or to him, to act. We do not become passive, but we are surrendered, and this is not the same thing. And when we turn to God, having said to Him, ‘Lord, I believe, yet help my unbelief, I can believe a little, but supplement the great lack of trust which is mine’, when we have said that, we must let go of any delusion that it is our faith, our surrender, our gift of self to God that will work the miracle of harmony, of peace, of healing which we expect of God. We must recognise that as far as we are concerned there is nothing more we can do than surrender, because our faith, like that of this father, is so frail and so incomplete. We may say ‘Lord, I cannot even imagine that it can happen, I cannot even not imagine it may happen, yet I surrender’. These were practically the words that the Blessed Virgin, Who was to be Mother of God, said to the Archangel: ‘How can that be, and yet, here am I the Handmaid of the Lord, be to Me according to His will’. One of the things which we must always avoid is to try and do more than we can, to try to be what we are not. The father says, ‘I believe, y e t help my unbelief’. He recognised it and he surrendered that part of him that could not believe. He gave to God that faith which he could afford, nothing more. And God did what the Old Testament already promised: ‘Child, give Me thy heart, all the rest is Mine’. Let us learn from this man who was so true, who so loved his child and yet did not, even for his sake, attempt to seem what he was not. Let us be honest, face God with all our integrity, even if that means recognising that there is only a sparkle of faith, little hope, practically no love, nothing but a cry, a desperate cry for help while we still do not believe that it is possible that it should come. And if we are that true, if we surrender that way, God’s answer will come. Amen.