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April 9, 2020On a recent morning, my children and I ventured to the green space at our park, each of us carrying a Styrofoam boat to float in the seasonal ponds situated at the base of the fallen elm trees. A combination of wind and sticks guided each boat safely across the pond, with the occasional one trapped in the reeds and the rare capsized boat rescued by its attentive owner.
Increasingly, sails were adjusted, and boats were situated for the wind to serve as a power source. Each and every pond was used, noticing their differing depths and lengths.
Three lovely girls testing toy boats, pushing them with sticks, dwarfed by towering trees, the leaves still budding, surrounded by wet, muddy grass: a picture of idyllic childhood springtime. And yet, a crisis brewed throughout the world.
Even here, the darkness of the crisis touches upon our lives: my almost 2-year-old is denied her request to swing; my older children, aware of the virus, keep their distance from the playground and other people; on our walk home, our neighbors walk on the grass, allowing our stroller to use the sidewalk.
More than these small changes, the crisis looms in my own thoughts: the new number of deaths and hospitalizations in Oklahoma, the rising unemployment, the new data out of Italy suggesting its staggering death toll is even higher than the official count, the fear for my mother and grandmother, my eldest’s godfather, a friend’s daughter – all those I know who are at higher risk of serious complications. My desire and my inability to help rise to the surface simultaneously, provoking supplication from the depths of my heart.
“Jesus takes advantage of every circumstance to show his disciples his way of facing all that happens, every unexpected, even painful ones, that they might experience the relevance of his presence, of the relationship with him of faith – to life’s needs,” I read. These words were written by Father Julian Carron, head of the international lay movement Communion and Liberation, during the current crisis, when all of the members of C.L. in northern Italy are affected. They echo what the founder of C.L., Servant of God Luigi Giussani, insisted time and time again: Christ is in the circumstances. Reality is given to us as a path to know him, to become more aware of his presence and more attached to him.
Following this path, a doctor and mother in Northern Italy wrote to Father Carron, “Trials are the way faith can grow, if our freedom is put into play in the face of that Christ that ask everything of us. This is dizzying. We have to entrust ourselves and accept the risk. The certainty that sustains our life is a bond, and there is a journey to make before we arrive at that affective certainty. Circumstances are given to us to help us become more attached to the one who calls us in a mysterious way. Faith is trusting that he is calling us. ‘It is only when a well-founded hope prevails that we are able to face our circumstances without running away.’”
This doctor, who elsewhere in her letter states that she is living apart from her family in order not to infect them with coronavirus, who is spending her days treating patients suffering from serious complications due to the virus, can enter into these trials by adhering herself more fully to Christ.
Can I do the same?
Can I, in much less dramatic circumstances, entrust myself to Christ? Can I continue on the journey toward certainty, without becoming defeated? Can I adhere to the mysterious presence of Christ?
I take steps on the journey by anchoring my day in prayer – the Angelus three times a day, morning prayer and evening prayer at a minimum – and paying attention to the circumstances given to me, starting in my own home. Each day, I fail, but I continue to walk. Each day, my certainty grows. My certainty does not lie in knowing what this moment of crisis will bring or how it will resolve, but in Christ, who became man and dwells among us.
Anamaria Scaperlanda Biddick is a freelance writer for the Sooner Catholic.