Corridors of gratitude December 7, 2025By Leonard J. DeLorenzo OSV News Filed Under: Commentary About a decade ago, on pilgrimage to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Ta’Pinu in Gozo — the island next to Malta — I found myself walking through corridors lined floor to ceiling with tokens of answered prayer. Letters and paintings hung beside leg braces, arm casts, babies’ clothing, walking canes that belonged to the elderly. Each one told a story of someone who prayed for Our Lady’s intercession and received grace in return. There are thousands more not even on display. Standing there, I was overwhelmed — imagining all these people who shared this world with us, and the mercy of God working through the Blessed Mother to bring them healing and kindle love in their hearts. What these objects represent is obvious enough — prayers answered, crises survived, desperate moments when someone cried out and grace broke through. But what strikes me is what they reveal about faith. These aren’t tidy stories. They’re the evidence of collisions between our helplessness and God’s mercy. And they give voice to that plea from Mark’s Gospel that has always stopped me short: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” I’ve never gotten over that line. The father bringing his demon-possessed son to Jesus doesn’t pretend to have faith he doesn’t possess. He doesn’t wait until he’s sorted out all his doubts. He just comes — belief and unbelief tangled together, hope mixed with doubt. And Jesus? He doesn’t scold him for his uncertainty. He heals the boy. Apparently partial faith, offered honestly and desperately, is enough. That’s what I see on those walls at Ta’Pinu. People who believed enough to pray, who doubted enough to be shocked when their prayers were answered, who suffered enough to know they needed help. These aren’t monuments to unwavering certainty. They’re evidence of faith that took a risk on hope even when it felt foolish. They mark the moments when ordinary people discovered that God doesn’t wait for us to get our spiritual act together before he moves on our behalf. He just asks us to turn toward him with whatever we’ve got, however inadequate it feels. And yet, not every prayer gets answered the way we want. Not every sick person gets healed. Not every disaster is averted. Some people have to keep their crutches. That leads me to grapple with a more difficult truth: Sometimes suffering itself becomes the gift. We don’t like to accept that. But saints and mystics, theologians and ordinary believers keep testifying to it across the centuries — that God uses our pain to draw us closer to him in ways comfort never could. Teilhard de Chardin, that Jesuit priest who spent his life trying to see Christ in everything, wrote about the mystery of suffering with a clarity that’s almost unsettling: “That the Spirit may always shine forth in me, that I may not succumb to the temptation that lies in wait for every act of boldness, nor ever forget that you alone must be sought in and through everything, you, Lord, will send me — at what moments only you know — deprivations, disappointments, sorrow. What is to be brought about is more than a simple union: it is transformation, in the course of which the only thing our human activity can do is, humbly, to make ourselves ready, and to accept.” Not every ex voto offering celebrates escape from pain; some celebrate the grace to endure it, the strength to carry it, the transformation that occurred within it. Some of these objects were likely left by people whose prayers were answered not by removal of suffering but by the gift of companionship within it — the discovery that Christ dwells most intimately in the place of our greatest need. Perhaps that is the paradox those corridors proclaim: Faith is not the absence of doubt and grace is not the absence of suffering. Faith is the cry “I believe; help my unbelief,” offered again and again throughout a lifetime. And grace is the assurance that this cry is heard, that the Lord who welcomes our partial faith also welcomes our unadorned pain and works within both to accomplish what we could never achieve alone — not merely healing, but transformation; not merely relief, but union with him. The walls of Ta’Pinu hold the stories of countless souls who learned this lesson before us. They came with broken bodies and broken hearts, with tentative faith and persistent hope. They came to ask for miracles, and they received them — sometimes in expected forms, sometimes in forms they could only recognize years later. They left behind these tokens of gratitude, these small monuments that together compose a great testimony: that God is faithful, that prayer is heard, that mercy flows through Mary’s intercession, and that the journey from belief to fuller belief, from suffering to transformation, is the path we all must walk toward the fullness of life in Christ. Read More Commentary Encountering Christ in neighbors facing detention, deportation and loss The Immaculate Conception and the evolution of dogma Immigrants, refugees and the Holy Family Finding peace amid Christmas season in ‘big city’ The boozy brew Charles Dickens popularized, and its connection to St. Nicholas Why authentic friendships outshine AI companions Copyright © 2025 OSV News Print
