The Litany Of Trust

I have written before about trust as an element of faith (see Growing Our Faith Through Obedience And Trust).  Trusting takes practice.

At about the time I was writing that article I was introduced to the Litany of Trust from Sr. Faustina’s order, the Sisters of Life.  (You can find a copy of the litany online at here.)  The litany is, in a way, a kind of laundry list of places, points, doubts and/or fears that can lead to or exacerbate problems with trust, followed by a list of reassurances.  Both are useful in the struggle to improve one’s ability to trust.

Consider the ‘trust fall’

Of course, not everything is useful in improving trust.

Consider for instance, the ‘trust fall.’ This is an element of some team-building exercises in which one member of the team stands with his back to the rest of the group. The person then lets himself/herself fall backwards, trusting the group to catch him/her.

There are also variations of this technique.  In a more dangerous version, someone falls backward from a pedestal or a stage – but the basic outline is the same. A person falls back without seeing the people who have promised to catch him/her, and depends on them to do so.

Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, while the exercise can establish trust for continuing the exercise, that trust does not tend to extend into ordinary life. The trust ends after the team building exercise ends.

I suspect that one reason this is so is because the trust fall is typically done as a team building exercise with a leader present.  The leader supervises the exercise and serves as a reminder to the people who are supposed to catch the person falling that their failure will not go unnoticed.

While it is called a trust fall, it could also be labeled as a social pressure device to simulate how a person might act if he could trust others to be reliable and responsible concerning his personal safety.

Trust fall is a lot more convenient – and shorter! – as a description.

What does seem clear from this, however, is that people are more capable of behaving like they trust others when there is an enforcement mechanism in place. They do not so much trust in others as they do trust in organized activities with social pressures attached.

Trusting The Fallen

Even if we are convinced that a particular person is obnoxious and untrustworthy, we can still be fairly confident that this person will attempt to hide that part of his or her nature when others are watching, especially when they are watching closely.

In other words, people can be trusted more easily as long as the cost to them of breaking trust is noticeably greater than the difficulty of keeping trust. This is arguably a cynical observation, but it is not untrue as a generalization for human relationships absent strong bonds of friendship or kin.

When we do a trust fall, we do so into the arms of fallen human beings. Would trust be necessary if humanity were unfallen?

That is a huge counter-factual, of course, but it invites some comparisons.

Even if I were at work with the same group I had been with on the team building exercise, I might have some reluctance to do an unsupervised trust fall, especially several months after the exercise concluded.  But in a world populated by unfallen humans, I would be far more confident of being caught by strangers, even in a random situation outside a designated and designed team building exercise.

At the same time, I find it more difficult to imagine why I would do a trust fall in an unfallen world than I have imagining that the people around me would fail to keep me from hitting the ground uncaught.

But that is imagination. We live in a fallen world filled with fallen people, and most newscasts and newspapers offer abundant confirmation of that sad and dismal reality.

Trusting The Unfallen

Being perfect, God is, of course, unfallen.  (Our Lord Jesus and those angels who did not choose to rebel are also unfallen.)  So it should be easy to trust God, or, at the very least, easier to trust him than we do other humans.

Life experience, unfortunately, has a way of making that difficult. Our actual experiences in life mean we are all scarred and damaged by the trials and tragedies of living that life in a fallen world.

This scarring means we sometimes echo, consciously or unconsciously, the French painter Henri Rousseau, who once said that “God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”  Having been taught that God created us in his own image, it can sometimes be a struggle not to picture God as an extra-special, supernatural, “perfect” human being.

Of course one part of the Holy Trinity, Jesus, is all that and much more.  But Jesus himself is not the complete Trinity – not the whole of God. He is, however, completely trustworthy, as are the Father and the Holy Spirit.

This does not mean that we can easily abandon our hard learned, self-protective ways of skepticism and mistrust with a single, simple act of will. Most of us will have to work on it.

The Litany Of Trust

This work is where the Litany of Trust can become an extraordinarily powerful tool. While it may not specifically list every trauma, doubt, or fear that blocks us from trust in in God, it has a remarkably complete generalized list that I have found extremely helpful in working with my own problem areas in trusting.

Just a few examples, first of things to be delivered from:

• From the fear that I am unlovable
• From anxiety about the future
• From the fear of being asked to give more than I have

And then of things I need help to trust in more, or more fully:

• That Your love goes deeper than my sins and failings and transforms me
• That You always hear me and in Your goodness always respond to me
• That You will teach me to trust You

Like most all of us, I continue to be a work in progress. The Litany of Trust has become a powerful tool I can use for may part in that never-ending task.

Prayer:

Thank you Lord for the gift of St. Faustina and for the sisters of her order, the Sisters of Life, for their lives, their witnesses, and all the work they do for you and for us, your children.

Amen.