Mary teaches us to have faith

Mary teaches us to have faith. Faith means recognizing that the invisible hand of God is still at work and reaches right there where man cannot reach. Faith also means standing in this difficult and dramatic situation of today with Christian hope. May the difficulties of the present moment, this war that seems to extinguish all hope and destroy trust in man, the disorientation that accompanies us, not destroy our firm certainty that God does not abandon those who love him, that we are not alone, and that God guides history.

Mary also teaches us to enter the time of gestation, a time of patience, silence and waiting. The things of man are done in an instant, the things of God take time and come slowly: a long gestation is necessary for the new thing to be born. We no longer know how to wait; the fatigue of waiting for an immediate solution has tired us out. We want to control events, but instead they elude us and confuse us. Man consumes his time voraciously, while God's time unfolds over vast stretches: He digs deep, He lays deep foundations.

Mary’s pregnancy was equally nourished by patience, faith, silence, listening, praying and walking. And this led Mary to see and recognize the places and events around her where God’s own hand was doing something new: in her cousin Elizabeth (Lk 1:39-45), in her husband Joseph (Mt 1:18-25).

We do not understand everything today, we are not able to adequately interpret what is happening, and this is perhaps one of the elements that worries us the most: not being able to decipher and decode the dramatic present moment, to have the interpretative key that allows us to control current events, the present and the flow of endless violence, injustice and pain. But the certainty that nothing will separate us from God’s love, the security we derive from his faithfulness, cannot fail, and nothing, absolutely nothing and no one should ever separate us from God’s love.

Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa 

Catholic Archbishop and current Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem

Excerpt from his homily on August 31, 2024