God is without limit

By Fr. Robert Cranley
September 2005

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While serving for 13 years as a hospital chaplain, Scarboro missioner Fr. Robert Cranley recalls the following conversation he had with a nurse about the literal interpretation of bible stories:

The nurse had no problem believing in the annunciation; the pregnancy of the mother of John the Baptist; the miracles of Christ; changing gallons of water into wine; curing the sick; raising the dead. But she could never believe that Jesus would give us his body to eat and his blood to drink, the action at the Last Supper, his promise to the multitude and their rejection of the statement that only those who ate his body and drank his blood would have everlasting life.

Why could she not believe this? She refused God the power to do anything she could not do. In short, she limited God to only those things human reason could grasp and accept.

Lewis Carroll in “Alice Through the Looking Glass” wrote of Alice’s inability to believe and the Red Queen’s reply: "Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

What of me? I seemed to have no problems believing, until I considered God’s capacity to love and forgive. I found that I would not accept this no matter how many times it is revealed in the bible: “There must be some mistake!” I was doing the same thing the nurse was doing— limiting God to accommodate human abilities, trying to bind God’s actions to my powers of intellect; failing to grasp that God is infinite, God is love, God’s forgiveness is without limit. God even loves my faults and failures, so that God may forgive them also.

That is why we must become as little children, with total trust and total love, with no questions or doubts. That is the secret of the little way of St. Therese of Lisieux. Her vocation, she said, was “to be love.” That is the vocation of all of us. St. Therese, pray for us that we may be open to all the love God has for each of us.

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