From Fr Cloherty
“It can happen that God seems to become distant. Some people are disconcerted by the impression that God is silent. Could the trusting of faith consist in saying ‘yes” to God’s love even if there is a deep silence within us? (See Ps 42:3 and 5). Faith is like a surge of trusting repeated a thousand times over the course of life.
We need to remember that it is not our faith that creates God, and it is not our doubts that can cast him into nothingness. Even were we to feel no apparent resonance, the mysterious presence of Christ never disappears (see Mt 28:20). Although we may have the impression of an absence, there is above all the wonder of his continual presence.
When worries succeed in distancing us from the trusting of faith, some people ask themselves: have I become a nonbeliever? No, they are gaps of unbelief, nothing more.
The Gospel invites us to place our trust in Christ again and yet again, and to find in him a life of contemplation (see Mt 28:20). And Christ speaks these Gospel words to each of us: “Seek and you will find” (Mt 7:7).
For my part, I can say that when I was young, at a certain moment my faith seemed to be shaken; I did not really call into question the existence of God. What I doubted was the possibility of living in communion with him. I wanted to be so honest that there were times when I no longer dared to pray. I thought that I needed to know God in order to pray.
One fine day, when I was still young, I opened an old book and my eyes fell on some lines written in archaic French. The author wrote that although God was not communicable, Christ made him known: “Christ is the resplendence of God.” I never forgot that It is Christ who enables us to understand that God loves us (Jn 17:26).
In the summer of 1937 Lily, one of my seven sisters, the one to whom I dedicated my childhood poems and to whom I was very attached, fell seriously ill. She was the mother of five children. I realized that she was expected to die. Then I was able to say a prayer, these words of a psalm: “My heart says of you: seek his face. I am seeking your face 0 God,” I was able to kneel down and say that prayer. I realized that faith was in me and that it could be nothing other than a quite humble trust in God.” God Is Love Alone, 65-67