And at first, Jesus says nothing. Think about that for a moment. She prays—and she hears nothing. But she keeps after him, to the point that the disciples want Jesus to send her away. But even when Jesus finally speaks, his words seem anything but
encouraging.
But that doesn't stop her. She goes right up to him, falls to her knees and begs, “Lord, help me!” It is the cry of a desperate woman, convinced she has no place else to turn.
At which, Jesus looks into her tear-stained eyes and says, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”
So, why did Jesus finally respond? Was it because she wore him down? But there is no wearing God down. We do not need to persuade him to keep loving us, he made us and he will never forget us any more than a mother can forget to love her child.
Remember Abraham bargaining with God over Sodom? “What if there are fifty innocent people there? Will you spare the city for fifty?” Yes. “Forty? Thirty? Twenty?” Yes. Yes. Yes.
Finally Abraham asks, almost apologetically, “What if there are only ten?” And God replies, “For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it.” So patient is the love of God that he never stops listening, never stops caring, never stops loving us, no matter what we do or how we feel. As Pope Francis used to say, “God never tires of forgiving. We are the ones who get tired of asking for forgiveness.”
Yeah, we get tired—tired of asking, tired of waiting, tired of repenting, tired of beginning again.
But God does not gets tired of loving us. That's something Saint Teresa of Calcutta—Mother Teresa—understood better than we could have ever have imagined. For most of her life, the world saw Mother Teresa as the tough little nun, filled with sweetness, faith and joy: walking the streets of Calcutta and the world, picking up the dying, caring for abandoned children, feeding the hungry, praying before the Blessed Sacrament. We imagined that she must have felt close to God every step of the way.
But we were wrong. For after her death, her letters revealed something quite different. For long periods, she wrote, she struggled with an unrelenting spiritual darkness. She described
“this terrible sense of loss—this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual longing for God.” Once she wrote simply: “I just long and long for God.” That may be one of the most beautiful things ever written by any saint.
Not: I feel God.
Not: God always answers my questions.
Not: Prayer fills me with peace.
Just: I long for him.
But, despite the suffering, she kept on going. Day after day. Year after year. She went to Mass. She received Holy Communion. She made her holy hour. She prayed her Rosary. She cared for
the dying and the abandoned—not because it made her feel good, but because she knew that God loved her, even when she could not feel his embrace.
Eventually she even came to understand that darkness as a participation in the suffering of Christ upon the Cross. She even came, she wrote, to “love the darkness,” because it united her
more closely to the suffering of Jesus.
So the next time you pray and feel nothing; the next time you wonder whether God is listening; the next time you fear that God has taken a vacation or is looking the other way—
remember that Canaanite woman and that little nun from Calcutta.
They never gave up on God. And neither should we.
