“Do your best and God will help”
Opening his meditation, Bishop Varden recalled Mary Ward, the 17th-century English Catholic educator, who encouraged her sisters with the simple conviction: “Do your best and God will help.”
This, he explained, is foundational to biblical faith: the belief that God truly engages with human suffering and human striving.
Unlike the remote, impersonal “Unmoved Mover” of classical philosophy, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — revealed fully in Jesus Christ — enters human weakness with compassion.
God’s help: a place to dwell, not a hotline
Bishop Varden cited Psalm 90: “He who dwells within the help of the Most High.”
Drawing on St Bernard of Clairvaux, he described God’s help as a “habitat” — a spiritual atmosphere in which believers live, move, and have their being.
God’s help, he stressed, is not an emergency service we call only in crisis, “like dialling 999.” It is a constant, sustaining presence.
When God seems silent: the witness of Job
Bishop Varden acknowledged the painful reality that many believers experience: a sense of divine silence.
Here, he pointed to the biblical figure of Book of Job, whose story unfolds like a three-movement symphony:
- Lament
- Menace
- Grace
Job rejects the easy theological explanations of his friends. He refuses to believe God is simply “balancing the books” of his life. Even unhelped, he cries out:
“If it is not he, who then is it?”
His struggle reveals a faith that seeks God not only in blessing but within affliction itself.
Is our faith an “insurance policy”?
Bishop Varden warned that believers may unconsciously treat religion as a form of spiritual insurance — assuming that because we trust God, no serious harm should befall us.
When suffering breaks through that illusion, our world can collapse.
He asks:
- Do I follow Job’s despairing wife who urges him to “curse God and die”?
- Or do I seek a deeper, more mature relationship with God beyond mere barter?
God, he said, can dismantle the walls we thought were our “world,” precisely to free us from what suffocates us.
From lament to grace: learning to live deeply
To live within God’s help, as St Bernard urges, is not about chasing guarantees.
It means:
- Passing through lament
- Confronting menace
- And emerging into deeper grace
Only then can we live with spiritual maturity, receptive to the new life God creates after old walls fall.