A reflection on Luke 6:43–49 for Saturday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time.
Jesus’ image of the house built on rock has always sounded reassuring to me. Build your life on faith, and when the storms come, you will stand. But grief taught me that the image is more complicated than that.
When my son was stillborn at 38 weeks, I did not feel securely planted on rock. I felt swept away. For a while, my faith wavered. I could not easily reconcile the God I had trusted with the silence I experienced after such a terrible loss. Familiar prayers sounded different. Some days they felt impossible. I did not stop loving God, exactly, but I no longer knew how to understand him.
Looking back now, I can see that God was not absent. He was in the casseroles that appeared at our door, in the cards sent by parishioners I barely knew, filled with prayers from people who had no idea what else to offer. He was in the women who quietly told me about the babies they had lost, sometimes many years before. Their stories did not take away my sorrow, but they gave me companionship inside it. They showed me that grief could remain part of a life without becoming the whole of it.
Slowly, over the course of years, I began to recognize God again. Not in easy explanations, and not in anyone telling me that my son’s death had happened for a reason. I have never found comfort in that. I found God instead in people choosing tenderness: in someone remembering, in someone showing up, in someone making room for another person’s pain without trying to repair it.
And eventually I began to see that perhaps this, too, was part of the foundation Jesus was describing.
A strong foundation is not a life protected from suffering. Both houses in the Gospel face the flood. Faith does not keep the waters from rising. What faith can do is give us something deeper to stand on when they do. Sometimes that foundation is prayer. Sometimes it is Scripture or the Eucharist. Sometimes it is the stubborn belief that love remains stronger than despair. And sometimes, God comes to us through other people.
That realization changed my faith. I became less interested in tidy answers and more interested in presence, less interested in explaining suffering and more interested in how we accompany one another through it. Perhaps that is one of the fruits of grief I never would have chosen but have come to recognize: the conviction that we truly can carry one another. A meal can matter. A card can matter. A story shared honestly can matter. A small act of goodness can become a place where someone encounters God again.
The storm did not leave me unchanged. It never really ended in the sense that I stopped missing my son. Love does not work that way. But over time, grief and hope learned to live beside one another. I began to see God’s presence again in ordinary goodness, in kindness freely given, in people caring for each other when there was nothing to gain.
Perhaps that is what it means to build on rock: not to become unshakable, but to discover, slowly, that even when we are shaken, love is still beneath us.
Prayer
God of steadfast love, when our foundations feel uncertain, help us recognize your presence in the people who stay, listen, feed, remember, and love. Make us that presence for one another, especially for those whose grief has made faith difficult. Teach us to build our lives not on easy answers, but on compassion, mercy, and the enduring love revealed in Christ. Amen.
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