I have had Psalm 116 (today’s Psalm) bookmarked in my Bible for almost three years now.

Three years ago I became very ill; like Aeneas, I was confined to bed (though for a matter of months, not for eight years!) and like some of the disciples in the Gospel reading, I was tempted during this time to “no longer walk with him.” It was easy to think and feel that God must not really be “there,” or that he had abandoned me or didn’t love me. I imagine it must be easy to think and feel this way for any person of faith during any period of intense suffering of any kind, especially when so many desperate prayers have been poured out, and when we remember all the stories of miracles in Scripture. “Why won’t God help or heal me?” is very natural to wonder.

At one of my lowest points, during Thanksgiving week of 2017, I lay on the couch and whispered St. Teresa of Avila’s words: “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few.” But something changed in me that day. I then thought of Teresa of Avila’s own severe illness (malaria) and of St. Francis of Assisi’s constant struggles with poor health. I thought of all the martyrs who went to their violent deaths with unreasoning praise and not reproach for Our Lord on their lips. It would be another month before I “turned the corner” physically, but it was at this moment that I “turned the corner” spiritually. It was as if I heard Jesus ask me, as he asked the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” and somewhere in my soul I was able to respond, like St. Peter, “Master, to whom shall [I] go? You have the words of eternal life.”

My favorite character in children’s literature is C.S. Lewis’ “Puddleglum.” One of my favorite passages in all literature comes from The Silver Chair, one of the Chronicles of Narnia. Puddleglum and the other protagonists in the story are held captive underground by a witch, and, under an enchantment, are tempted by the witch to, essentially, renounce God and faith. “There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan.” At the climax of the story, Puddleglum puts his own foot in the witch’s fire to dispel the enchantment, and delivers the following speech:

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always likes to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Supposed we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seems a good deal more important than the real ones. Supposed this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

I don’t know whether C.S. Lewis had today’s Gospel in mind when he wrote this part of the story, but both passages seem to depict the same crisis of faith – or maybe, rather, they both depict the birth of true faith. When no help seems to come, when everything we recited for years in the Creeds seems unreal, when the Gospel seems too difficult or too offensive, when the sacrifice seems too great, “to whom shall we go?” Are we still on Aslan’s side? What, really, is the alternative? Tuesday, November 21, 2017 was my Puddleglum moment, my “to whom shall we go?” moment. It was the moment my faith became faith.

“Things only get worse before they get better,” as the saying goes, and that was certainly true for me in my battles with the diseases that had left me bedridden. A couple weeks before Christmas of 2017 I read Psalm 116 and marked it, holding onto hope and faith that someday I would be able to pray it in actual fact.

It struck me in reading the passage from Acts 9 that it is easy to see God working through Peter, healing Aeneas and then raising Tabitha from the dead, but easy to miss that God was working all along through Tabitha herself. The author of Acts writes that “she was completely occupied with good deeds and almsgiving.” Although I am doing much better today and am no longer bed-ridden, I was not miraculously healed and I still struggle. A few days after my moment on the couch, I was, however, referred to a remarkable doctor (whom I’ll call Dr. M.), who was compassionate enough to really listen to the symptoms I was describing and wise enough to correctly diagnose - in a matter of minutes - and prescribe for the infection that had been missed for months. When she discovered I had no health insurance, she did not want to accept any payment. After three torturous weeks on (finally) the right antibiotic, I was able to leave my bed and the couch, just before Christmas of that year. Later that winter, however, I was spiritually and emotionally struggling again with the fact that so much suffering seemed to have been allotted to me earlier. “God, why didn’t you help me? Why did you leave me to suffer so horribly?” I cried. The thought came to me, then, that he had helped me – not through a miracle like those of St. Peter’s, but through the “good deeds” of the Tabitha in my life, Dr. M. Even if we never see a miracle in the strict sense, God is working all the time through the good deeds and almsgiving of many, including, hopefully, ourselves.

“O LORD, I am your servant; I am your servant... you have loosed my bonds. To you I will offer sacrifice of thanksgiving....” Someday God will heal me completely and I will be able to recite Psalm 116 - a “Thanksgiving for the Recovery from Illness-” in full and in joy. It may be through a miracle; it may be through the continued care of Dr. M.; it may just be through the natural course of time; it may not be until my death and the resurrection of my body. “It is the Spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail.”

“Courage, friends. Whether we live or die, Aslan will be our good lord.”