Trust Human and Divine

After lunch today I meandered, after another frustrated attempt a solving a bureaucratic conundrum, into what I thought was the fifth floor of the library I am currently working in only to find all of my things missing. Being towards the end of the lunch hour, this level of the library was almost completely empty except for the most dogged of researchers, most likely PhD students. I began to panic, checked another aisle, then went back to the one I was sure I had sat in and check the drawers, as if all of the things could possibly fit into such a small space. Then I went to the storage room in the back. Nothing, I began to wonder what librarian to ask for help and if they were going to chastise me for leaving my things like that for over an hour. Since it’s a fairly closed off area mainly accesible by researchers only, I had done it, like everyone else, multiple times in the past, but you never know the temperament of the rotating librarians and their penchant for enforcing the rules while running their hushed fiefdom. Then I noticed the floor, it’s age and colour, and I began to doubt my memory, a wave of surreal feeling came over me, did I just imagine the new flooring? It is really an odd feeling, as if I wasn’t sure I had lived what had lived just a mere two hours earlier. Some calm came over me, I started to wonder if I had inadvertently stepped out onto the wrong floor (it happened once last year). While waiting for the elevator one of the seminarians I vaguely recognised from the faculty came up and greeted me, we took the elevator and without thinking I got off on the same floor. I regularly forget that PhD’s and Theology master’s students get assigned desks on floors that aren’t necessarily the ones most relevant to their subject. I began walking towards the door while scanning the subjects listed on the shelves: history, I had somehow walked into the 3rd floor library, but I didn’t remember seeing the student hit any buttons and I must have hit the 5th floor button…..ostensibly not, one instance in which trusting my own memory is not possible. 

We humans are regularly called upon to trust ourselves, others, things, and God at an almost unconscious level. I flew back, half way across the world, on a metal contraption that elevated me and thousands of other unsuspecting beings millions of kilometers over the water and ground. Never once did anyone think that this is a deep act of trust, an unquestioned belief that the metallic bird will actually land at our destination and we will all emerge in one piece. And so we go through life, unthinkingly trusting so many unspoken realities ostensibly taking for granted that they will work as they ‘always’ have. Never really considering that many of these things have existed for a very short period of time, shorter in most cases than the lives of our parents. 

At another level, I have been thinking about trust, trust in others of course, what builds trust and how dependent our trusting others may rest on trust in God. And what does trust in God mean anyways? A week or so ago I was travelling to Spain from Germany, it had been an all too short visit to the archives in Cologne. At some point between uber, train, plane, and bus I came across a prayer by St Therese of Lisieux. “Loving God, help me to rely on you providential care in each circumstance of my life…” Providential care, such a beautiful way of considering providence, that abstract concept few people fully grasp (Aquinas probably did) in all its multilayered reality, and most tend to misconstrue with God operating directly on reality. For example: I am in need of rest, it will take some time to recover from a complicated year and when I arrived in Pamplona I felt the need to call my godmother, and without even planning to ask about a retreat I did in fact ask, and two hours later, I found myself booked into a one day retreat in the nearby mountains the following day. This I took as God caring for me via my godmother and the retreat organiser by giving me the day in nature and in chapel that gave me a bit of the rest that only He can give. St Therese’s words resonated on these days. But where is this care when something hurtful or bad happens at the hand of someone else? And where does trust in others stand when that someone else who hurt you is someone you trust not to hurt you? This is a particular area of theology, one that deals with “the Problem of Evil”, and entire area of systematic theology that would need way more space that I currently have today. 

BUT thanks to sin, particularly original sin that made us into disintegrated beings every single person can and will hurt those around them by a faulty use of their freedom, affected by an inordinate, disordered or unhealthy desire for something: be it gluttony, lust, power, money, when someone places any of these vices- ie desires for something (or someone when lusting) that in origin is not necessarily bad, over the good of yourself or someone else you are bound to hurt someone. This mistake in one person does not make them entirely evil, it makes them weak, and we all have this weakness, we will all one day hurt someone because they stand in the way of our inordinate, disordered desire for something or someone. It is not that God allows evil to happen rather God can take good out of an evil situation, He redeems the pain lived. To prevent it would imply that God intervenes directly in a human beings freedom. This is a difficult concept and an even harder reality for someone going through the pain of betrayal to understand. It is hard to understand how good can come of evil, and in some cases, we are unlikely to see or understand what that good is until God reveals it to us at some later date. There is a reason this area of theology can be so thorny, and only the truly brave at heart confront it. In some instances though, the situation in question, for example, one in which you are forced to doubt the wisdom of having trusted someone, leads to a deeper understanding of yourself but also of trust itself, of how trusting someone is not something theoretical, rather it is an act of the will and to trust someone again, a recognition of their faulty nature, our common humanity prone to mistakes. This case I mention is much easier when it is not something grave or truly damaging. Forgiving in all instances is very important for healing but trusting again is nto guaranteed. When it is grave, forgiveness is essential for your own well-being but it is advisable to not trust that person again. This requires clarity and a healthy integration with yourself to understand what has happened and whether trusting again is at all possible.