When Angels Rush In
Posted by Marion Fernandez-Cueto in Faith on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 6:00 AM
Forgive me if I gush, but our dreams came true last week. Our prayers were answered. My husband, out of work for seven agonizing months, has found a job.
Make that five jobs. Five fabulous, viable work opportunities. Five.
If you’d predicted the future two weeks ago, I might have laughed in your face, but I wouldn’t have been smiling. Two weeks ago was the worst of times—the worst we have experienced in six years of marriage, and the worst I have known in my 32 years.
Extended unemployment had decimated our savings, and over time, our hope and confidence too.
Day after day, month after month, we had pounded the proverbial pavement — blitzing my husband’s staggering real estate industry with resumes, phone calls, and meetings. No one seemed to care.
Night after night, through Masses and Holy Hours and broken, choking prayers, we had pounded on Heaven’s door — imploring God not just for a job, but for enough patience, courage, humility and love to endure whatever the heck sort of trial this was. He didn’t seem to hear.
When my mother died suddenly from a stroke midway through the experience, I felt the last shreds of my faith begin to disintegrate completely. In their place grew a dull, dark anger. And then the beginnings of something worse: despair.
Where was God in all of this? I wondered. Couldn’t He hear us, begging for help? Couldn’t He see us, desperately treading water and slowly, slowly, drowning? My intellect said that God was still near—that we were being called to carry our cross, do our best and simply trust Him. My will chose to do so, and stubbornly, too. But my heart ... my heart just felt betrayed.
All my life, I have had the gift of faith. Since childhood, I have turned to God as easily in times of great sorrow as I have in joy, never doubting His goodness or care. Prayer has often seemed as effortless as breathing. Yet now, for the first time, God seemed to be absent, and His silence, mocking. Had my husband slapped my face and left the house without a word, I couldn’t have felt more devastated or bewildered. Prayer itself seemed like a joke.
That’s when I was invited to pray more.
“You guys need to say a novena,” urged a well-meaning relative. “Pray a novena for a job. And for faith.”
She sent me a copy of a novena for work. The n-word: inwardly, I shuddered.
Maybe it’s my Protestant upbringing, or just my cynical nature, but I’ve always been squeamish about novenas. I know they’re a sanctioned and time-honored tradition of the Church, these nine-day periods of prayer for particular graces or intentions. I know they express our dependence on God, and our childlike trust that He yearns to pour out His blessings on all those who turn to Him in need. I know that traditionally, novenas have proven to be extraordinarily efficacious, and that they come highly recommended by numerous saints.
All too often, however, I have seen them used superstitiously as spiritual chain letters or incantations to God the Great Vending Machine, as if the words and number of the prayers themselves held some kind of magical power. Whenever I hear someone raving about a specific novena that “really works,” I cringe a little, for it sounds as if they have discovered a secret formula for getting God to do their will.
“Thanks,” I told my relative, “but I think we’ll just keep using our own words.”
Two days later, a friend emailed me with the same advice — and the same novena. “I hope this can help Andres,” she wrote. “We are praying.”
“What’s the point of praying this novena for work?” I asked my husband that night. “How is this different or better than our other prayers? What if nothing happens, and that makes me doubt God more? Or what if we actually do get a job afterwards and I have to tell my friends they were right?”
My husband burst out laughing. “Maybe we should just try praying it,” he said. “Besides,” he added, “it might just be good for your pride.”
The next day, we started the novena.
There was relief in its very repetition, in the sheer predictability of this new nightly routine. On days when I felt too numb or empty to form “my own words,” the novena offered me a way to keep praying, a way to cling to God in the dark. I was reminded of my godmother, whose only child had been killed in a car crash at 18. For years after the accident, her only prayer had been the Apostles Creed, repeated over and over and over—- “I believe, I believe, I believe.”
Even though I couldn’t bring myself to believe in the novena we were saying, I felt healed and comforted by the faith-filled words.
But the next week, miracles started happening.
On Monday, I was offered a job—an unexpected, part-time, close-to-home job, with babysitting. On Tuesday, my husband got an offer himself. Then another. And another. By Friday, we had a total of six job opportunities between us.
“We’d better stop praying!” I joked to Andres, “This is getting crazy.”
But our hearts were singing. Tomorrow, my husband starts work for the first time in more than half a year.
Meanwhile, I still don’t know what to make of our novena experience, but I’ve realized that gratitude doesn’t require a labored analysis. Like a child, I can simply leap with joy and thanksgiving in the presence of so many blessings. Like Mary’s spontaneous Magnificat, I can praise God’s goodness and faithfulness with a heart that overflows.
What I do know is this: God heard—and hears—our prayers: even the angry ones, the anxious ones, the tearful ones, and the ones recited purely by rote. He stoops to receive them all, and all of them He answers, in His own mysterious time and way. Our Father in Heaven will never abandon us, nor leave us in despair, and though the wait may sometimes seem unbearably long, He will never betray our hope in Him.
Now, even as I rejoice, I pray for those who are still walking in the doubt and insecurity we came to know so well this year. I pray for those burdened by grief and unemployment, as so many prayed for us, and I offer with these prayers a poem by Ann Weems that I found on a scrap of paper among my mother’s things, shortly after her funeral:
Into this silent night
as we make our weary way
we know not where,
just when the night becomes its darkest
and we cannot see our path,
just then
is when angels rush in,
their hands full of stars
—Marion Fernandez-Cueto writes from Houston, TX. She was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2000.
Praying Hard, Trusting Harder Part 1
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