It is we who put limitations upon the mercy of God, who cannot believe that there is nothing we can or must do to "deserve" it, that it is given to us unconditionally and is totally free. We are afraid that God’s mercy, like ours, is finite and can end. It is this failure to trust that is the reason for our loss of Paradise and the root of all our sin.

When we say that we trust God, we sometimes mean that we believe God will help us in our troubles, answer all our prayers, and look after all our needs. But our trust must be bigger than that. We must also trust God when suffering overwhelms us, when our prayers seem unanswered, and our needs unfulfilled.

Can we do that? Can we trust God blindly, "madly," as St. Therese of Lisieux liked to say?

Trusting God unconditionally means believing that no evil in the world, no disaster or tragedy, can ever prevent God’s mercy from being poured out on us.

Above all, it means standing before him in all our weakness and sin and trusting that he will never reject us, however greatly and often we may have sinned; that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord (Rom 8:38-39).

Yet, how can we believe it? Nothing in our human experience compares to such love or tells us what it is like. In our heart of hearts, we know that in this world nobody, not even the most loving of parents, the best of friends, could love us like that.

We know that we could not love like that. We know that all human love, however true and genuine it may be, has a limit and can end.

Death, separation, our own sin—the core of selfishness present in the heart of every person in this life—can weaken or destroy it.

We cannot, therefore, even imagine with our finite minds what God’s infinite love for us means. We cannot make ourselves believe in it; we cannot trust it totally or unconditionally, in spite of the darkness we find lurking in our own hearts, in spite of all the evil and suffering we find in the world. Such faith and trust are given only to the saints.

Blessed Elizabeth of the Holy Trinity, a Carmelite nun who lived in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, liked to say that God loves everybody, but only saints really believe it.

Saints are not those who are always "good," who are "sinless," but those who, certain of God’s love, can be totally open to the truth of their being, who do not need to justify themselves in any way, or to hide or to pretend. Saints are unafraid and free.

Saints have the grace to hold onto their trust in God no matter what evil they may encounter, no matter what suffering they must undergo, because they know that God’s love is infinite and that the ultimate answer to the mystery of evil and suffering must therefore also be love.

Such heroic trust may not be given to us, we may never be able to experience it in this life, but we can always pray for it and, in love and ceaseless repentance, surrender our weakness to God.