S1 Ep. 38: When Disappointment and Faith Meet

Transcript

Carol Vassar:

From SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut, I'm Carol Vassar, and this is Living in Faith, Hope, and Love. Each week, our Pastor, Father Mark Suslenko, delves into Scripture, shares insights from the saints, prophets, and theologians, and discusses practical ways to cultivate faith, strengthen hope, and embody love in the world around us. Through his reflections and spiritual encouragement, this podcast aims to inspire you to live your Catholic faith with joy and purpose. Welcome. 

Today, Father Mark invites us into an honest, grace-filled reflection on something every one of us knows all too well: disappointment. What do we do when life doesn’t unfold the way we hoped? When illness, loss, or even our own shortcomings leave us feeling disillusioned? In this encore episode, Father Mark helps us see how faith reframes our expectations—not by denying the struggle, but by opening our hearts to the healing presence of Christ. He reminds us that for the person of faith, there is never a true dead-end. Even in our darkest moments, God is leading, transforming, and calling us into new life. 

Here’s Father Mark

“When Disappointment and Faith Meet,” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut

Father Mark Suslenko:

Without faith, our hopes and expectations lie solely with what is around me. So therefore, in order for me to find a measure of contentment and happiness, without faith, all of the pieces of the puzzle of my life have to be put together properly. I become the manager of how well that occurs and whether it occurs. Without faith, the structures, the systems, the priorities of the world, our places of security, our institutions, our homes, what we have in our bank accounts, my level of prestige, my level of success, all of those things take on a greater importance. They even consume me because I know, in the back of my head, without faith that if those things aren't working properly, then my life is not going to function as well as I want, without faith.

With faith, our hopes and our expectations can be adjusted, refocused, and redirected. But how? Very often in our lives, people of faith live their life as if they had none, and negotiate their disappointments and their disillusions as if they had none.

Think of a moment, perhaps recently or in the past, when you have been deeply disappointed or disillusioned. Maybe you received a phone call about a friend of yours who you never expected would be facing the end of their journey of life, and their place in life is disappointing to you. Or maybe you're going along and things are functioning pretty well and you know that there's something wrong, but you go to the doctor and you find that it's way bigger than you ever thought that it would be, and you put all this effort into being healthy and being well, and now your body is bringing you to another challenging place.

Or maybe the disillusionment is with yourself. Maybe you're frustrated because you're constantly bumping up against your weaknesses. You can never get it to work right? You can never quite accomplish the task, or be on time, or do what others expect of you, and it seems that at every moment you're running behind that eight ball of life. Or maybe the disillusionment or the disappointment comes in one of your sons or daughters who you had hopes and expectations would live life well, but has made choices and have found themselves in places where they, rather than living in the light of joy and happiness, are struggling with a lot of darkness, doubt, despair, and even perhaps addiction.

Life's disappointments can come in all kinds of packages and look very different to every one of us. But the fact of the matter remains, we're all going to be disappointed and disillusioned at some point in our lives, but what do we do with it? Because the person with no faith and the person of faith are going to approach those realities much differently. Much differently. You see, sometimes we can, even if we have faith, we can do battle with our disappointments. We can find ourselves giving into them too much, becoming mired in anger and bitterness, unable to get over the question of why I have to go through this particular point in my life or why this is happening to an individual that I love. We can even find ourselves becoming a victim of circumstance or intent and feeling like we're on the short end of the stick, always coming up on the wrong side of things. And this anger and this bitterness and this sense of being a victim can also then lead us to a place where we experience extreme apathy because we can find ourselves even saying, I've done all these things and this still has happened. What's the point? What's the point? I am up against the brick wall. What difference does it make in the end of the day? Whether I pray, whether I have faith, whether I do this, or whether I do that?

The person of faith needs to ask a very powerful question, and how the question gets asked and answered is going to determine what then happens to their disappointment or their disillusionment and the question is this: how can the healing raise of Christ enter into and transform my disillusionment and my disappointment?

You see, for the person of faith, there is never a brick wall. There is never the end, and even the darkest of disappointments and the most severe of disillusionments, there is always the hope for something new; something different. We're never totally without options. And there is a call within every experience of disappointment. We are being led somewhere at all times. It may not be where we expected to be led. It may not be where we thought we would be. It may not fit with the plan that we have for our lives, but we are nonetheless being led. And maybe the call in the disappointment is to change up our priorities a bit, to tweak how we view life, to do an assessment of what is really important, to shed some baggage and some sinfulness, to change how we see ourselves in others, to become creative, to embark on a new journey, to try something that I never thought I would have the courage to try and look at myself honestly, and see gifts that maybe have been there all along, but I never noticed before.

You see, God can always bring us and does always bring us on new journeys, and it's through the shedding of our disappointments and working through life struggles that we begin to encounter and hear this call. You know, people tell stories all the time, people the faith, of how they were in one place and lost a tremendous amount. Maybe part of their physical selves or their emotional selves, or whatever it may be, but still found themselves able to touch others, to bring God's blessing to places where they never thought they would bring it before. You see, because the person of faith at some point or another in their lives has to come to this one simple conclusion.

Regardless of how I think about it or how I feel about it, I am who I am with what I have. And when a person is able to accept that in the depth of their heart and soul, then the light of peace and the light of God's presence can dawn.

Maister Eckhart, wonderful, tremendous spiritual theologian, said that as long as the "give me more and more" attitude exists in a human being, God cannot live in or work in that soul. You see, as long as I still think that I'm on the short end of the stick, or as long as I think that I still want and want and want, or that I've been shortchanged and I need to be somehow compensated, as long as that mentality exists, then God cannot live in and work in that individual, in that soul because the soul is closed off.

Maister Eckhart continues to go on and say that ultimately the goal and the desire of every human being is that God be born within, So then what is our hope with eyes of faith? If this world can disappoint us so much and the stuff then we treasure so deeply can be gone tomorrow, absolutely gone. Then what do we hope in? We hope in the transformation of becoming the very image of God ourselves, that we realize that we're not meant to just simply be here, that the fulfillment of my life and my joy and my peace is eternally to be found in God. And that is the hope that a person of faith works towards. And when we can get ourselves to the point where we can truly abandon ourselves to the divine presence, if we can humble ourselves enough to place ourselves before God and realize that I am 150% devoted and depended upon him in order to negotiate my life and not on myself, then we will never realize what God can do in our lives and the transformations that can come.

St. Augustine had a tremendous prayer. It's a difficult prayer to say because it takes a lot of abandonment. But it nonetheless is powerful. He says, Lord, when I bow before thee, hardship, suffering, and labor are lifted from me.

You see if we can be in right relationship with God, regardless of our circumstance in life, regardless of where we find ourselves to be, regardless of what we're facing in the trials that we're encountering, if we can be within the presence of God, even for just a moment and utter that prayer and place ourselves in his loving presence, like a lamb around the shoulders of a shepherd, then we can truly find peace. And it's okay.

So as we face life's disappointments, the person of faith never loses hope. There is always a way through the journey. All we have to do is persevere in our faith, hold fast to our relationship with God, and remind ourselves as much as we can, that we are on a journey that is far different than the one we sometimes think we are on: a journey that ends in the very arms of our creator and in his loving embrace.

Carol Vassar:

Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. If you like what you've heard today, please subscribe to Living in Faith, Hope, and Love on your favorite podcast app and take a moment to leave a review.

SS. Isidore and Maria is an active parish community, so whether you’re a long-time parishioner or are just getting to know us through this podcast, we welcome you to join us at Masses or any of our other community events and services. Visit our parish website - isidoreandmaria.org - for a full schedule of Masses, services and other happenings. That's isidoreandmaria.org. We're also active on Facebook and Instagram.

On behalf of Father Mark, I'm Carol Vassar, and we thank you for listening to this episode of Living in Faith, Hope, and Love.