FAITH TO MOVE MOUNTAINS

A REFLECTION FOR THE 23RD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Faith is the means by which two separate people are restored to health in today’s Gospel.  One is cured of a twelve-year-old issue of blood, the other is actually raised from the dead.  The first was cured by her own faith and perseverance in her attempt to reach out and touch our Lord’s garment; the other was brought back to life by the faith of her father who simply asked that it be done.

We often ignore the good saints whose feastdays fall on a Sunday.  But today, St. Gregory the Wonder-Worker deserves a special mention, precisely because of the theme of today’s Gospel.  It’s often said that faith can move mountains.  And St. Gregory certainly had faith in abundance.  In fact, so much faith that he actually did miraculously move a mountain through his prayers.  That sounds very far-fetched, and no doubt the modernists scorn the idea of a mountain being moved to a different place by prayer.  They play down the miracles of St. Gregory and focus on other aspects of his sanctity that fit better into their agenda of humanistic love and fellowship.  But it’s not for nothing that he’s called Gregory the Wonder-Worker.  He was renowned more than anything else for the wonders he performed.

Saints who work miracles do not do so through their own power, as they would be the first to remind us.  I don’t care how holy someone is, they aren’t going to tell a mountain to move somewhere else.  The English King Canute was revered by his subjects, so much so that they attributed to him magical powers.  But Canute was a holy man, and to teach them a lesson he commanded them to place his throne on the beach facing the incoming tide.  He then commanded the tide to turn around and not encroach further up the beach.  He did not pray for it to be done; he just told the seawaters to turn around, pretending that he had authority over the waves.  There was no spiritual reason for giving this command except to prove to his subjects that miracles are performed only by God, not by any king.  By the time the cold waters of the North Sea were lapping around his ankles, they got the message.  King Canute is today revered not as a powerful magician, but as a saint.  St. Gregory performed many wonders, but only by praying for them to be wrought by the divine power of God.

The reason why St. Gregory prayed to move the mountain is significant.  It certainly wasn’t just to show off the power of his prayers.  The people were trying to build a church, but the mountain was in the way of the construction.  There were two spiritual reasons therefore for the miracle: to show that prayer and faith are indeed powerful enough to move a mountain, and to allow the construction of a church—a tabernacle of God amongst men.  St. Gregory was a very fervent son of Holy Mother Church.  In fact, as he lay dying, he asked how many heretics remained in his city.  They replied to him “seventeen.”  St. Gregory then thanked God, as seventeen was the number of Christians when he had first arrived there.

The moral of this story, where we are concerned, is that by prayer and faith, we can convert the lost Catholics, the apostates, the modernists, back to the true Church.  We can turn our small minority of traditional Catholics back into the majority, by praying with faith that the stone-cold mountains of faithlessness be removed, and our Church may be rebuilt.