God’s Help: Alight With Hidden Glory
Mary Ward, that great Christian educator of the 17th century, used to tell her sisters: “Do your best and God will help.” The notion that God can and will help us in our predicaments is axiomatic to Biblical faith. It sets the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God made compassionate flesh in Christ Jesus, apart from the Unmoved Mover of philosophy. God’s helpfulness expresses his mercy, the hesed of the Hebrew Scriptures, a quality first named by Lot, of all people, when he found himself helped to escape the destruction of Sodom even as he was unwilling to do his own best, ignoring the angels’ instruction to flee to the hills, settling instead for a “little town” in the lowlands, there to while away the remainder of his days in lurid mediocrity.
It is an ongoing challenge to find the right balance between personal effort and faithful abandonment to divine assistance. This challenge is the subject of St Bernard’s first sermon on Psalm 90, which engages with the Psalm’s opening verse: Qui habitat in adiutorio Altissimi, “He who dwells within the help of the Most High.”
God’s help, says Bernard, is rightly called a habitat in as much as it forms a sustaining reality within which we can live, move, and have our being. God’s help is not occasional to us; it is not an emergency service we call out now and then, when a house is burning or someone has been hit by a car, the way we might dial 911. God’s help is an attribute of his Being that keeps us in being. When Christ says, “without me you can do nothing,” this is literally true. The fact that we exist is positive proof that God does help. The question is, do I make my home within that help, as in my Father’s house, or do I pine for some “distant country” where I imagine I might live off my own resources? If I do, it is an unproductive dream. What seems to me a place of autonomy where I might be myself undisturbed is in fact, Bernard would insist, a “region of dissimilitude” where I cut myself off from the roots of my identity.
We can best appreciate what it means to dwell within God’s help, Bernard tells us, by considering three kinds of people who do not dwell there. He defines them with reference to the virtue of hope. The three groups are, variously, those who have no hope, those who despair, and those who hope in vain.
The literally hopeless are those who see no need to inhabit God’s help because they are comfortably ensconced in self-sufficiency. Such people can be found even in the Church. A man strong in vigils, fasts, or works may begin to think of himself as rich in merits. He slackens in the fear of God. Thinking he can manage quite well on his own, he yields to “a pernicious security” expressed in growing superficiality and in arrogance. He turns into a bully. He gossips about others. He becomes a counterwitness to the religious state he imagines he embodies to perfection.
Those tending to despair stand for a second class of people estranged from God’s help. So impressed are they by their own weakness that they lack energy and, really, will to reach for God’s strong help, finding instead perverse satisfaction in their miseries, which they never cease to recount to any captive audience. Neediness, too, can become a golden calf whose cult induces a daze of introspection.
The third kind, those who hope in vain, take God’s mercy for granted, so they see no need to bother with amending their faults. Their hope, notes Bernard, is vain for it lacks charity, springing instead from assumptions of entitlement.
If we want to learn what it means to dwell within God’s help, graciousness is called for and courage, as well as an awareness of our own needs. More often than not, it is by falling that we learn to be helped. The just and the unjust alike fall, but there are differences. Those who live within God’s help find they can fall without being crushed by falling. God “places his hand underneath” them. Because the just who live by faith in God’s help ascertain this, they can rise strengthened from a fall. Those who discount God’s help, whether for arrogance or pusillanimity, will incline, rather, to stay knocked out, not minded even to attempt to rise.
What Bernard says makes sense. But what about occasions when God-fearing people fall and are apparently abandoned, crying out to heaven but getting no perceptible response, hearing only the desolate echo of their own voice?
The Scriptural type of such plight is Job, masterfully expounded by Gregory the Great in a text dear to the first Cistercians. Gregory’s Moralia in Hiob was copied in the scriptorium of Cîteaux already in 1111, the year of Robert’s death. To put Bernard’s thoughts about God’s help in perspective, though, I should like to draw on a contemporary interpreter who sheds surprising, helpful light on this theme.
The French Protestant theologian Marion Muller-Colard begins her essay on Job, L’Autre Dieu, with an account of a pastoral visit. The year is 2001. She is 23, has done the requisite courses, studied Greek and Hebrew. She is duly dispatched to gain experience by visiting an old lady in a wheelchair. She asks some locals for directions. They oblige “the way roadside peasants show a knight the way to the dragon’s den,” silently, with a gesture of the chin and an anxious look. Having rung the doorbell, she ascertains: “She hated me as soon as she set eyes on me.”
The young woman realizes that everything about her—her youth and charm, her brisk mobility—seems a reproach to the chair-bound, ailing one. As she enters and sits, brought down to eye level, her host spins a paralyzing web about her as she recites her bitterness, points to objects of desolation, and recalls grievances.
Outside there is spring. The visitor knows she can soon re-enter it while the old woman will stay imprisoned in her wintry world, surrendered to “a chaotic succession of empty hours, of days and weeks untouched by any appetite for life.”
The scene is conventional. We recognize it. What sets this account apart is Marion Muller-Colard’s awareness of a subtle change of tone as her companion, warmed up, continues her soliloquy. At one point the litany of specific complaints yields to something more fundamental. Muller-Colard calls it the Lament. She spells it with a capital first letter, as if it were a subject in its own right.
“The real Lament rose crescendo. It poured forth like a groan from the depth of the ages.” “I do not recall the words,” she notes, “the Lament doesn’t care about words, has no need of them. Words are just a pretext. The Lament did not have an object either. It was the Lament, pure and simple, and I recognized it.” After a while the effusion stops. The old woman, abruptly silent, fixes her visitor. The two of them sit there, opposite each other, resembling, mutatis mutandis, boxers in a ring.
The Lament has been a form of anticipated attack against expected platitudes. The challenge is clear: “Counter this one!” Muller-Colard is aware of being trapped. She knows it is her turn, now, to step forward. A response is required; a word is called for. But what sort of word might be sufficient? Clutching her pocket Bible she knows: “Were I to produce an unctuous word, the Lament would leap at my throat. Were I to say nothing, it would likewise leap at my throat.” The Lament, long settled as master of the house, holds the old woman in a tight grip. A bright plaster of hope would be no remedy for the wound it inflicts. Muller-Colard is conscious of a single strategic advantage. She has heard the Lament before. She can recognize it.
This recognition gives her audacity to open her Bible and read:
Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night which said, “A man-child is conceived.” Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, nor light shine upon it . . . Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning; because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.
Stunned silence follows, but silence of a different kind, unlike the one that reigned before, no longer hostile but open, wondering.
Muller-Colard remarks matter-of-factly: “It was not I who paid the old lady a visit that day. It was my old brother Job. And it was to him she opened the door the following week with a smile she astonished herself to have found in her archives.”
This story tells us that helplessness cannot stand easy recipes. It can only stand itself. That is why our all-wise God, whom we adore as “Almighty,” emptied himself and assumed a helpless form to come to our help. When a person has been hurt in spirit, mind, or body, it may take anti-poison to draw accumulated poison out. The soul needs time for the spasms that enact its bilious eruptions. These belong to the birth-pangs of hope. The human response such a soul calls for does not have to be explanatory or comforting. It must be compassionate. The soul needs to hear that it has been heard, that its signal has been picked up and understood.
Marion Muller-Colard next turns specifically to an exegesis of the Book of Job. She considers how, in the introduction to the drama, Satan, the Accuser, parleys with God insinuating that Job’s exemplary piety is contractual. “Have you not,” Satan asks God, “put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side?”
In other words: have you not extended your help as an enclosure, hemming Job in, keeping him from any need to doubt or rebel? What wonder, then, if he comes across as “blameless and upright”? The question is what would happen if Job thought God’s help had let him down. The Lord, certain of Job’s probity, surrenders him to Satan’s temptation. Great disasters befall. Job declares nobly: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.”
From this point, the end of the prelude, Muller-Colard understands the Book of Job as a symphony in three movements. The first is that of the Lament. When Job, after seven days and nights in silence, opens his mouth, it is to utter the very words we heard resound in the wheelchair-bound woman’s flat. They rise like a rebellion from within. They are strikingly unspecific. Nowhere does Job refer to the loss of his seven sons, three daughters, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen et cetera. At the level of faith he accepts that these are no more. He knows he cannot have them back. His Lament is an effort to say it as it is and to speak his conviction that there can be no neat explanation; his trial will not fit into parameters simply of guilt and retribution. Tribulation’s sensed senselessness, its darkness, is the core of it. That is what Job’s Lament spells out. And it is what his three friends cannot bear to hear.
The friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, are in many ways admirable. They come to sit quietly with Job in his desolation, sharing his mute grief. Only when he speaks do they rise up in dismay, feeling called to defend the underlying justice of a universal order, to insist that God will have his reasons for what he has brought Job through. Job is immovable. He refuses to posit that God is just working out sums in his life as if it were a balance sheet. Unhelped, he is determined to find God present in his affliction, calling out heroically: “If it is not he, who then is it?”
This is the point at which the symphony’s first movement, the Lament, flows into the second, which Muller-Colard calls Menace. It stands for realization that faith in God is not tantamount to safety. Job had been a belt-and-braces man. He had both lived justly and made supererogatory sacrifices of expiation, should unwarranted sin occur, despite him, in his house. His loss has taught him that he stands unprotected.
The Lament is a post-traumatic utterance. Think of a man who, after an earthquake, spends hours beneath rubble. He begins to sob only once the weight is lifted, having needed all his strength, till then, to stay conscious and to keep madness at bay. The Lament embodied by Job lurks in any soul. It is mostly asleep, but prepared to be awakened in the aftermath of liminal experiences that force us to peer over the edge of our existence into an apparent abyss. Specific pains may provoke the Lament, but the Lament is not reducible to specific pains. Like a predatory wild beast “it carefully covers,” writes Muller-Colard, “the paths leading to its lair.”
Physicians and pastors tend to fix their attention on individual bruises when, in fact, what is at stake is the vast, all-encompassing trauma of devastating questioning: “What if, after all, nothing makes sense? What if God does not help?”
As believers we may at some level regard our religion as an insurance policy. Certain of subsisting within God’s help, we may think we are out of harm’s way. A world can seem to collapse if—when—harm strikes. How do I face trials which cause my carefully assembled, customized protective fencing to fall? Is my relationship with God one of barter, disposing me to follow, when things are hard, the counsel of Job’s hard-headed wife to “curse God and die”? Or do I live at greater depth? To help others faced with existential Menace, I must have worked through it myself. The consolation I carry will have no authority if it is only words.
The second movement of the symphony of Job bids us look whatever Menace may surround us in the eye, and to own our brittleness—physical, moral, and spiritual. Only once these inward depths are scoured are we ready for the third movement. It stands for the discovery of Grace. This turning point is first announced halfway through the book when Job, who has long seen nought but darkness, cries out: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth . . . and my eyes shall behold and not another.” The motif of Grace erupts impenetrably unexpected without any outward change of circumstances.
What prepares it? Not the hackneyed catechesis of Job’s well-meaning friends, but the hollowing out, within Job, of a new capacity for perception. Relieved of false, idolatrous notions of a string-pulling god who deals in currencies of calculable grace, he is ready to encounter God in the immensity of his mystery, no longer as a private protector-god, but as The Other God of Muller-Colard’s title—as the Unfathomable.
When the Lord at last answers Job, after Job has spent 37 chapters pouring forth his Lament and sense of Menace, it is not to dictate a taut theodicy in defense of divine justice. No, the Lord tells Job: “Gird up your loins like a man: I will question you.” “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” “Have you entered into the springs of the sea?” “Can you send forth lightning?”
We may wonder: is this a pastoral approach? It is, here. It helps Job burst the chains of a self-centered quest, to look up and glimpse the true God who in this grandiose book is invoked under the title of El Shaddai, a mysterious name that is open to diverse interpretations. One of these, according to the Rabbis, would translate El Shaddai as: “He who says: Enough!” Even as God, in the beginning, created the cosmos by fixing boundaries for the tohu wawohu, he orders our chaos by blowing it into the seas, letting dry places appear to turn these, later, into fertile land.
God can enable a new world after he has pulled down walls we thought were the world, walls within which we actually suffocated. Job breathes again. Aware of the transience of things, he sees that God is greater. He acknowledges that God does not promise security but virtue for trials, also face to face with death. Job bows down and worships. He, the supremely tested, confesses: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, now my eye sees you.” To live within God’s help as St Bernard would have us do is not to peddle securities. It is to pass through Lament and Menace in order to live graciously at this new level. So as to enable others to find it.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Alight With Hidden Glory: The 2026 Papal Retreat (Bloomsbury, 2026). This book of reflections preached by Bishop Erik Varden to Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Curia at the 2026 Lent retreat will be available on 19 May 2026, All rights reserved.
