Crisis of Faith/Crisis of Love

Chapter 5

by Fr. Thomas Keating

The Silence of Jesus

Let us review once again the dialogue between Jesus and the Canaanite woman and look at another aspect of the crisis of faith. The question to be answered is: what constitutes successful passage through the crisis of faith? This determined woman successfully passed through her crisis in a few moments. It will doubtless take us many months or years to negotiate ours.

She came out of the district of Canaan crying, “Have pity on me, Son of David, because my daughter is sorely tormented by a demon!” The gospel says, “In answer to her, Jesus replied not a word.”

Let us observe these words rather closely. You will notice the gospel does not say he gave no response. Nor does it say he answered “yes” or “no,” but simply: in answer to her request, he did not say a word.”

In other words, as far as Jesus was concerned, silence, lack of response, is a real answer. In this particular case it is the answer that the woman got to her request.

As we listen carefully to this exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman, we observe a gradual change in her dispositions. And that change marvelously illumines the state to which the passage through the crisis of faith is meant to lead.

To translate this incident into our own everyday experience, here is someone whom Jesus is trying to draw away from an immature and self-centered relationship with himself to something more worthy of God. This person has faith, but it is still very weak and based in large part on our usual experience of effort and success. We have a way of looking at all our activity and judging it on the basis of success: so much so that if we put in effort and fail to get proportionate results, we feel frustrated. Suppose we do good spiritual reading regularly and put in an hour of prayer every day, or spend a year or two studying Theology or Scripture. We expect to see some fruit. If we think of fruit in terms of spiritual progress that we can feel and understand, we may be in for disappointment. As time goes on, the more effort we make to get closer to Jesus, the more he seems to recede into the recesses of the books or of the tabernacle. He always seems to be “out” when we call.

Let us look at the dialogue a little further. She started working on the disciples. They finally came to Jesus and complained, “Lord, for goodness sake, send this lady home contented. She cries so after us. She gives us no peace.”

Here again the answer is not “yes” or “no.” It is the rather enigmatic statement: “My mission is exclusively to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Finally she came and prostrated herself before him. Notice that the delay, if anything, is increasing her desires. It also seems to be increasing her humility. Having prostrated, she pleads, “Master, help me!”

 The reply again is not “yes” or “no,” but another enigmatic statement: “It isn’t fair to take the bread of the children and throw it to dogs.”

This is an abstract or speculative statement. In the speculative order, it is not fair to help her. He appeals to the fact that his food rightly belongs to the people of his household, not to slaves, and still less to dogs, to which category he implies she belongs. In other words, she has no right to any help. But that is not to say that she is not going to get any.

There is just a hint in these words that Jesus’ defenses are breaking down. “It isn’t fair” is a rather weak argument people make when they are about to give in. It represents their last stand. Perhaps she sensed this in her extraordinary wisdom. In any case, with great pleasure she accepted the insult—without, however, withdrawing her request. It was not a clear refusal. If Jesus had said “no,” the situation would have been different. But he did not say “no.” The answers he is giving her, while they appear to be refusals, are actually a series of come-ons, of invitations to hope.

Her faith in this dialogue gradually blossoms into boundless confidence. She penetrates somehow into the mysterious silence of Jesus. She recognizes his enigmatic refusals to mean merely delayed action. Not a brush off, but a postponement. The postponement in granting her request is the occasion he takes to raise her, by means of his secret grace, from faith, to hope, to confidence. True confidence is based on the struggle to be patient in suffering and the experience of God’s help.

When faith grows into confidence, the crisis of faith has done its work and the crisis is resolved. Deep interior peace reigns.

The Lord does hear. The silence of Jesus is the ordinary means he uses to awaken in us that perfect confidence that leads to humility and love—and to gaining all that we ask.

Ask somebody whom God is trying to jockey into this kind of crisis, and he usually will say something like this: “I’m going backwards. God doesn’t love me anymore. He doesn’t listen to my prayers. He never gives me what I want. I can’t find him in books. Prayer is a mess, one distraction after another. Temptations of every kind abound.”

And yet underneath all that debris there is the same kind of perseverance and longing for contact with God which proves that grace is secretly at work. What is actually being destroyed is our dependence on our own ways of going to God. Actually these much-loved souls are being invited by Christ to the same kind of expansion of faith that the Canaanite woman experienced. Remember what the grand finale was. At a certain point, when her confidence reached the degree Jesus was waiting for, he acquiesced and said to her, “Woman, great is your faith. You can have anything you want!”

What we really want and what the Holy Spirit is inspiring us to long for in the crisis of faith is the experience of the eternal Word of God in our inmost being. It is to be brought inwardly face to face with the living God, who, faith assures us, dwells within us, and who, hope reassures us, will reward those who seek him with his presence.

More information can be obtained by reading the book Crisis of Faith/Crisis of Love by Fr. Thomas Keating.  It is offered in our bookstore.