The readings from Sirach and Mark on Monday remind me of the "Serenity Prayer". You know the one I'm thinking of--although you may not know the WHOLE prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
This is usually where the Hallmark cards and souvenirs end the prayer--but there is more:
Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.
I am also reminded of Proverbs 3:5-6:
Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths.
What is the wisdom of God? Is it that there is order and not chaos in the heavens? Is it that molecules and atoms behave in a designated way? Is it that the trees know when to bloom and animals know when to bear their young? Sure, it’s all of these, but this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the effect of God's wisdom on His creation.
What kind of wisdom clothes us, the most beloved creatures of God's creative hand? Certainly we are clothed with more wisdom than we are aware of and sadly, more than we accept and put into operation. Often, it seems, we have stripped ourselves of God's wisdom, preferring instead what we consider a better way, our way.
Naked and bereft of God's help, we eventually destroy what was created as good. We alter the divine balance that which holds creation together in harmony; we meddle and wrongly misuse the intelligence He has given us.
But we needn’t be despondent! God has not abandoned us or stopped loving us. Instead, He is always present, waiting and extending His almighty hand to re-clothe us in the garment of His wisdom. All we have to do is grasp His extended hand and cover ourselves in His glory.
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus helps a young boy and his father by casting a demon out of the boy. But in order to do so, He requires the father of the boy to have faith. Only because of the father’s faith did Jesus help his son. I often find myself going back to confession again and again with the same exact sins that I ask the Lord why He can’t just cure me and take my compulsion to sin away. This reading holds the answer: God allows us to live as we do with the constant temptation to sin because He wants us to work on our faith. He wants us to exercise our God-given wisdom.
But what does Jesus mean when He talks about faith in the Gospel? One can define faith as acceptance of Jesus’ free gift of saving grace, offered by His death on the Cross. But accepting His gift requires both believing in His grace and living it as well. What we believe should mirror how we live; that is what Jesus is trying to accomplish through letting us deal with our own sinful desires. Through our struggle against sin, we learn that only through God can we become ideally human and truly “made in His image.”
Prayer is another aspect that is present in this Gospel, even if it is just barely mentioned. At the very end of the reading, the disciples ask Jesus why they were unable to drive the demon out of the boy themselves. He replies, saying: “This kind can only come out through prayer.” Prayer is very important in our pursuit of faith. If faith is the acceptance of God’s saving grace through our belief and actions, then we need to have some form of relationship with God to fully understand what we believe and how we act. Through prayer we can communicate directly with God, and He will always answer our prayers (although not always in the way we think we want or expect Him to).
So from all this we find faith has three aspects: belief, lifestyle, and prayer. Our belief serves to inspire us, our lifestyle maintains us, and our prayer gives us direction. If we have faith in our lives, the Wisdom of God tells us anything is possible and God will steer us in the right direction.
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