A Reflection for Wednesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
The Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel has a trait of which even the Apostles seem ignorant. Despite being first ignored, then denied help twice by Jesus, she still persists in asking him to help her daughter. The Gospels constantly show us persistence is a valuable and divine trait to possess. The Apostles themselves prove to be lacking it at points, falling asleep multiple times after Jesus calls them to stay awake at the garden of Gethsemane. So if laziness like this is such a common human fallibility, it seems that persistence makes us more like God.
A moment like this makes me reflect on moments in my life where I have or have not remainedpersistent. Persistence with my faith is something I’m very familiar with. There have been times where I’ve felt like the Canaanite woman, calling to God, but not receiving an answer.
During high school, I was blessed with the opportunity to go to a Catholic school and study theology. I was in constant discourse about faith topics both Catholic and otherwise. My teachers encouraged questioning of things, which I realize was a gift, yet the constant discourse and debate shook my beliefs.
I felt like a shell of the Catholic I should have been at the time and was constantly looking for answers that never seemed to come. How could I believe in a faith that had so much discourse around it?
This doubt and lack of answers continued into Covid-19—a time where I felt like God wasn’t responding at all. My teenage years, those years that adults around me often proclaimed as the best of their lives, were being interrupted. On top of this, I was lonely. Not only were there no friends around to hang out or spend time with, but there also wasn’t anything for me to put my faith in. At night my family would eat together and say a prayer, but while I participated, I remember thinking each time: “If this prayer is real, why is no one answering it?”
I finally received my answer through persistence. The answer wasn’t shouted to me; instead, I found it through continued prayer and the realizations that came with it. God answered my family’s prayers each night. We were safe and fed during a difficult, tumultuous time through which many others were suffering. God allowed me to question but was still answering, even if not in a way I could see.
As in today’s Gospel, it took a few calls to get an answer, but it wasn’t because God didn’t want to answer. God was looking for faith—and strong persistence in that faith.
