Have You Been Burned?

One

Have you been Burned?

A lot of people struggle to trust God because, maybe, they’ve been burned so many times in the past when it comes to religious people they thought they were supposed to trust.

Some people buy into some Catholic visionary who turns out to be a fraud. Or maybe somebody predicted the end of the world, or the chastisement, or the warning and it didn’t happen. Maybe there was somebody who everybody said was a super-holy person, and then it turned out they were a monster. Maybe you went to some faith-healing event, and they said that if you really believed, deep down in your heart, then you or your loved one would have a miraculous healing. And then you did believe, or at least your tried to believe, with all your heart. And nobody got healed. Or, worst of all, maybe you really trusted someone you associated with the faith, and that person let you down in a big way. 

So you say to yourself, “That’s it. I’m done buying in. I’m not falling for anything else. I’m good. If other people want to have faith, if they want to really go in for religious stuff, that’s fine. But I’m tired of getting had. I’ll just do my own thing.”

It’s a common experience. It’s the defense mechanism most of us reach for when we’ve been let down. But if you lose your faith in Christ and His Church because somebody else proved untrustworthy, that’s not fair to Christ or His Church. And it’s devastating for you.

Two

The Skeptical Dwarves

In C. S. Lewis’ last Narnia book, the villains of the story start giving certain orders, delivering certain messages, and basically saying they come from God. A group of dwarves wishes to be obedient, and they sacrifice themselves and totally submit to the false orders and false messages. Then, when the orders and the messages are totally exposed as a complete fake, this group of dwarves decides they’re never going to believe anything supernatural ever again. They’re so determined never to believe again, never to fall for anything again, never to let anyone pull a fast one on them again, that when they’re actually brought to heaven they just sit in a circle looking at one another and refuse to take any notice of the glory all around them. 

They got burned once, they’re not going to get burned again. Even if it means the difference between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness, at least they’ll never have to worry about being duped. 

That’s what happens when you decide that you’re done with the supernatural. And it isn’t good.

Three

Agnosticism as a Defense Mechanism

Skepticism and agnosticism are almost always the response to the frustration of having been deceived. It’s a basic defense mechanism usually driven by anger at having been misled and fear of being misled again.

Again, it makes us not want to have anything to do with the supernatural. But when you abandon your faith, when you abandon trust in God, in His revelation, in His Church, you’re actually losing the deepest source of truth there is.

It’s like deciding to keep your eyes closed for the rest of your life just because you once fell for an optical illusion. You’re abandoning a core faculty of perception. And even if you keep your eyes shut, you’ll still be walking around, moving around. You can’t help it. To live, you have to act. But without your eyes, you’ll get into a lot more accidents.

You can try to ignore the spiritual realm. You can pretend you’re agnostic about everything but you’ll still be living your life, only now you’ll be living blindly, unaware of the deeper spiritual meaning of everything.

No, we need faith. We need spiritual insight. But how can we trust in supernatural things after we’ve been burned, and sometimes burned pretty badly? The answer: we have to know exactly who and what to trust.

Four

Provisional vs. Absolute Trust

We live on trust in every area of life. We trust that the car and airplane manufacturers made vehicles that won’t kill us. We trust that our workplaces will pay us the wages they’ve promised and that if they don’t, the judges will punish them when we take them to court. We trust that our parents are telling us the truth about how they first met. And that geographers are telling the truth about the locations of the places we’ve never been to.

But, in all these cases, our trust is provisional. We know that, in principle, it’s not impossible that our trust is misplaced. It happens that those we are rational for trusting will nonetheless let us down. In fact, if you rely on somebody long enough, then eventually that person will let you down. You’ll be counting on them, and they won’t come through. They might let you down in a small way, or they might let you down in a really big, awful way. And that’s true of religious, faithful people too.

Priests, parents, spiritual leaders, Catechists – they will let you down. Sometimes in big ways, sometimes in really big, awful ways. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to trust them, but your trust has to be provisional. You have to leave room for them to get it wrong, or not come through when they should. 

When the dwarves in the Narnia story heard the reported messages and instructions from God, they knew they weren’t getting it through the official channels. They should have been more cautious. They could have tentatively accepted those messages but they also should have left some room for there to be a mistake somewhere.

So too with us: Jesus has given us a way of trusting Him absolutely, He’s given us His Sacred Scriptures and the Official Teaching of His Church. That you can trust absolutely. That you can take to the bank. That will never let you down. 

Everything else, everyone else, you trust in a qualified, provisional way. If it turns out that these other people let you down, well, that won’t come as such a surprise. Because you know that the only thing to trust absolutely is Jesus Christ as He has definitively revealed Himself in Scripture and the timeless teachings of the Church He founded.

Five

The Marks of Trust

So, just as a reminder, what does it mean to trust God? What does it mean to show Him that, even if those you might associate with Him have let you down, you know that He won’t?

Well, essentially trust in God means two things: It means obeying Him, accepting and putting into practice the truth presented in scripture and Church teaching. Because you trust that He wouldn’t tell you to do these things or not do these things unless it was for the best.

It means not getting angry or scared no matter what happens in life. Agnosticism and doubt, like that of the dwarves in the story, comes from anger and fear. Trust is trying to be free from that. 

So ask God to free you from anger or fear. Ask God for the grace to trust Him.