Having Faith in the Slow Work of God
“Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, “Patient Trust”).
“Why is he doing this to me?” I sobbed.
“God doesn’t do things to us; he does them for us,” my husband gently responded.
It wasn’t the first time I’d said those words out loud. It seemed like every month when I started my period, I had the same question, and every month, I struggled to embrace that it was somehow part of God’s providence. We struggled with unexplained infertility for nearly five years and exhausted nearly every ecclesially licit option to try to conceive a child. We had only one more treatment left to try. And I wasn’t hopeful.
Withholding His Fiat
Our fertility journey, in many ways, has served as a poignant metaphor for the Christian life. My husband and I did all the right things medically, from meticulously administering vitamins and medications to tracking fertile periods to increase the possibility of conception, only to come up time and again against the humbling truth that it was outside of our control.
Based upon the Church’s teaching regarding God’s will, theologians describe various expressions of divine willing, including God’s active will and his passive or permissive will (see, for example, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 311, 320 & 324 and St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae,” I, Q. 19.12). God’s active will is most clearly witnessed in his creation: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth— and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters— Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light … [he] found it very good” (Genesis 1:1-31).
By the creative power of his word, “fiat lux,” or “let there be light,” the Creator God shines light in the darkness and brings peaceful order to the primordial chaos (in Hebrew, known as the Tohu va-Vohu). It is his simple command, fiat— let it be, that forms all of creation. God creates freely out of love, because he desires his creation to share in his life and his freedom. Moreover, he sustains his creation even now, in this moment, for “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
But, if God is good and his creation is good, then why is there evil in the world? This timeless question has been posed to many a theologian throughout history. The existence of evil resonates with everyone, even righteous men and women, as prophets, the saints, and Christ can attest. To the timeless question of “Why evil?”, St. Augustine responds that because God “is supremely good,” he “would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself” (“Enchiridion,” 11). This is God’s permissive will.
As my husband and I desperately tried to conceive a child, it was clear that we did not sufficiently possess the creative power in ourselves to make it happen. Indeed, we cooperate in the creative activity of God by our mutual self-gift; but while that mutual self-gift is necessary, it alone is not sufficient to create human life. We said “yes” to life, repeatedly. And God, for reasons beyond our understanding, withheld his fiat, seemingly allowing our personal Tohu va-Vohu to overcome us.
Confusing Action With Progress
Our culture puts a premium on busyness, holding fast to the belief that if we appear busy with endless to-do lists and frantic demeanors, then we are somebody accomplishing something. However, our life experience reveals the falsehood of this perspective. In fact, often, a completed to-do list provides us with a short burst of dopamine—only to leave us feeling empty and anxious to do something else. As we addictively seek another dopamine hit, the ironic result is a neverending to-do list.
But action is not synonymous with progress. Sometimes, trusting patience looks like inaction, as God’s permissive will, in refraining from interfering in our life, does more to move the needle than anything we could ever do or comprehend.
Giving Life Unexpectedly
While mutually bearing the cross of infertility at times brought my husband and me closer together, at others, it served as a wedge between us that pushed us further apart. We became restless and angry with God. It was difficult to discern what possible good could come out of this experience. Why would God not only deny us children but also strain our relationship? When I could pray, my prayers were filled with bitter tears. Christmas was the worst. Kneeling at midnight Mass, I thought, “A virgin mother, Lord? Are you kidding me right now?” as tears welled up in my eyes. “What are you doing?”
In God’s inaction, however, his creative activity was at work in a totally unexpected way. Bishop Barron tells the story of a woman who endured months at her husband’s hospital bedside as he deteriorated before her eyes. One day, in her frustration with God, she went out to the courtyard and flung mud at a statue of our Blessed Mother. Security ran to stop her, but the chaplain held them back, saying, “No. She’s praying.”
My husband and I were being pushed apart as we endured what felt like the sterility of our love, but we were also being pushed together into the arms of God, one on his right and one on his left. Through our long suffering, he was creating our hearts anew (Isaiah 43:19, Revelation 21:5, 2 Corinthians 5:17), rendering our physical infertility spiritually fruitful.
Vanessa Crescio is an accountant with the Archdiocese of Saint Louis. She earned an MBA from the University of Notre Dame, an MTS from Newman University, and worked in the real estate and banking industries prior to serving in church management roles at the parish and diocesan levels. She is interested in thinking through co-responsibility in the Church and developing leadership programs to form Catholics to serve the Church with not only their knowledge, skills, and abilities but with the servant heart of Christ. Read more of her writing at FRESHImage, and follow her on Instagram.