The service of God — and particularly, of its very nature, the service expressed in the apostolate — involves close personal relationships. How can we not become committed? How can we remain detached? The problem is a real one, never altogether finding a satisfactory solution. But once again, the answer must lie not in the deeper understanding of our own mixed motives, whose whole business it is to yield unreliable findings, but in the deeper understanding of God’s will. If we truly intend to find, pursue, and perfect God’s will for us in the relationships that entangle us, we shall eventually come to view them within the pattern of His providence. It is only when we trust to luck that we are left to luck. Those things that we hide from God, God hides from us. Our safety lies, once more, in the realist approach: we face the issue as it is in God’s sight and ask that we may come to see it as He sees it.
Furthermore, it must be remembered that God does not show us things as He sees them unless at the same time He gives us the grace to handle them as He wills them to be handled. What would be the point of our seeing either the danger or the solution if there was nothing we could do about it?
A certain saint (whose name I unfortunately forget) trained himself to repeat over and over again, hundreds of times a day, the clause from the Our Father “Thy will be done.” This practice he regarded not as a devotion but as a necessity, for whenever he left off, he was assailed by the most urgent temptations against faith, chastity, and hope. As time went by, he found himself reduced to a state of extreme nervous tension, rattling off ever faster and faster “Thy will be done,” until he began to realize that there was an essential connection between the content of his prayer and the unsuspected nature of his temptation. Could it not be said that the Father’s will was being done when temptation assaulted his soul?
On the showing of St. James’s letter, this would seem to be the case. “Count it all joy when you fall into diverse temptations, knowing that the trying of your faith works patience . . . blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he has been proved, he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to them that love him.”32 Even if he could not go so far as to count it all joy when the attacks were raging, he could at least acknowledge the permissive and providential will of God. For an investigation of this aspect of God’s will, we shall need a separate chapter. It is a pity I cannot recall the identity of the saint referred to; he would surely come in useful to many. Anyway, he bears out in his experience the point we have been trying to make in this chapter.
Chapter 11
Discovering God’s Will in Our Lives
The merest glance at the history of heresies will show that it is the will of God in one form or another that the heretics have got wrong. In the early Church, there was the question of reconciling the divine and human will in the person of Christ. Later it was the difficulty of seeing how the wisdom of God, which is His will just as it is His love, operated in a Church that was composed of human beings. In Reformation times, the Protestant theologians of Germany, Switzerland, and France, developing a much older heresy, held that God willed some to be saved and others to be damned and there was nothing one could do about it. Later still there were the Quietists of the early eighteenth century who taught that to attain to sanctity, Christians must abandon themselves so totally to the will of God as to eliminate altogether the action of their own wills.
This is not the place for either a history lesson or a theological exposition, but if the reader is to get any sort of idea as to the relationship between God in heaven promulgating His eternal will and man on earth apparently twisting it out of all recognition, some mention must be made of the theologian’s distinction between God’s antecedent and his permissive will.
What beginner has not wondered at the seeming discrepancy between the doctrine of an all-wise God whose guidance is forever drawing the human race toward full stature in His divine Son and the factual indications to hand? Can wisdom itself choose unwise means to attain the required end? In going over the argument, it should be borne in mind that the term “mystery of God’s will” is a valid one. We are never going to arrive at a completely satisfactory understanding of it; but at least it will be something if we come to see the part played by human cooperation with it. Since the ground has been covered before in this series, the briefest survey will suffice here.
Working back to God from what we know of ourselves, we can trace an antecedent and a permissive way of willing in our relationships with one another. We desire, obviously, for our friends the best that life can bring. Antecedently we are willing them full happiness. While it is true that, as fellow human beings, we have no power to bestow this happiness upon them or make conditions for its realization, we possess at least this much in common with God: we leave the world wide open to make its own destiny. In other words, we exercise a permissive will toward those whose happiness concerns us. We feel responsible to them, because they are objects of our love, but not responsible for them, because they enjoy their own inalienable freedom.
The parallel is lamentably inexact, but bring it to bear on the infinite love which God has for man. Antecedently He wills nothing but good. In His love and wisdom, He has given to man as His greatest gift the power to accept or reject His will. The liberty of the human will is that which more than anything else makes the human soul resemble the divine. So, although God positively wills one thing in the created order, He allows in that created order which has known the Fall a different thing to happen. Had there been no Original Sin, the distinction would not have been necessary: man’s will would have obeyed the will of God, would have chosen to fall in with God’s designs all along the line, and there would have been no evil consequences to call for God’s permission. But with the rejection of willing service, man’s action is fraught with unhappy result. The so-called problem of evil is not explained away by this aspect of our first parents’ failure but merely made less of a mystery.
For most people, the difficulty is not so much with the existence of pain and suffering in a fallen world as with what actually happens when the will of God for a particular person is one thing and the person decides to do something else. Must this not in some way devalue God’s will, making it depend upon a perhaps purely frivolous decision of man?
Again an example may serve. Assume that a devout and rich man feels urged to build a church. He decides, after praying about it, that God wills a church to stand in a certain area. Many Masses will be offered, Catholics will be able to get to the sacraments who would otherwise be deprived, conversions will follow, and a new center of the apostolate will be established. If this rich man were to die or lose all his money, there would be no great problem. Anyone who knew about the project would assume quite naturally that it was the will of God: a pity, but manifestly the will of God.
Say, however, the rich man stays alive and stays rich but decides to open a racing stable instead. What has happened to the will of God? There it was, all ready, and a mere man has reduced it to nothing. Death and financial loss can be regarded as acts of God, and justified accordingly, but here was an act of man. The principle remains the same in each case: the actual outcome is what God has willed, and this is far more certain than that He ever willed a church to be built in the first place. Short of a direct revelation on the subject, it would not be for anyone to claim a knowledge of God’s antecedent will in the matter.
A point that remains open is what has happened in the mind of the rich man. Is his will now in line with the will of God? The answer must depend upon how far the undertaking had represented to him a real demand: how sincerely he had originally believed that a church was required of him. His change of plan may be anywhere between a serious rejection of grace, tantamount to turning down a clear vocation to the religious life, and a lighthearted deviation from what had been no more than a temporary religious enthusiasm. But whichever it is, and wherever he stands between these extremes, the grace is there now to help him make the best of the circumstances as they have
turned out.
This is an important thing to remember, because often it is felt that once we have neglected to cooperate with God’s grace at a high level, we are disqualified from cooperating again. Such a view would suggest a vindictive, even a touchy God. “All right: you have failed me over something which I wanted; now I shall cheerfully fail you over the things that you want. You have refused the heights; you can get along on the plains by yourself.”
St. Teresa33 at one stage lacked the generosity to accept the grace of contemplation. But by making use of the graces measured to her lower state, she eventually got back to where she had been before, and higher. It took her twelve years, and although to the end of her life she was full of remorse for her early infidelity, she was glad enough to have paid the price of getting back. Her experience teaches a twofold lesson: it does not pay to turn down God’s offers, but if we do, we have other offers waiting for us lower down the scale.
To be balanced against all this, the beginner, or even the seasoned practitioner for that matter, does not have to take every noble impulse that comes to him as being the will of God. Only scruples and confusion would result. The noble impulse has to be valued in relation to surrounding circumstances. There have been instances in the lives of holy people which suggest that the interior attraction to a certain course is both so strong and so clear as to override all secondary considerations, but such occasions must be looked upon as the exception. In the ordinary way, the urge, particularly if it calls for heroic or histrionic expression, must be looked at in the cold, hard light of reason, against the dusty, flat backdrop of actuality.
A young married couple decide that the most unselfish thing they can do is to have a mother-in-law as a permanent guest in their house. “This is a good thing in itself, and we feel the same about it,” they argue, “so it must be the will of God.” But must it — just like that? God will certainly bless their generosity if they follow through with the scheme, but it is equally certain that before doing so, they weigh it up according to prudence. How will it affect their marriage? Will it mean that the children’s education will have to suffer? Will friends no longer come? Will arguments or example give scandal? Admittedly, the main issue is the one to pray about, but these side issues may not be brushed aside as unworthy. They would not be there if they were not worthy, so God presumably wills them to act as guiding lines.
Where circumstances point in a particular direction, and still more so, of course, where they force a particular situation, the recognition of God’s will is relatively easy. But often we have to search for God’s will in a tangle of alternatives.
Our liberty of will is a great gift, but sometimes we wish we did not have so much of it. If only God, or even someone else acting in His name, would decide for us. Our job is to discover (in the strict sense of uncovering, and so bringing to light what is already there) God’s will in the exercise of our freedom, not to produce it by sleight of hand from an opinionated self.
Even in the religious life, where obedience might be thought to take care of everything, it is only too possible to make the will of God seem anything but what it is. The deluded religious can maneuver, fooling himself and other people. It is also true that however pure his motives, the religious can be as much at the mercy of his mistaken judgment as can the layman. Is he to accept, for instance, a position of authority that is offered him but not imposed? Say he genuinely believes himself to be unequal to it. Is he wasting a chance of furthering God’s work for souls by playing safe, or is he taking the reasonable means of averting disaster? Ought he to make the supreme act of trust in God’s grace and go ahead, or does God want him to use his freedom of will to back out while the backing is good? Neither circumstances nor the opinions of others tell him everything. His own judgment and his own experience may yield no information. What is he to do? There is nothing else he can do but pray. If he prays with a detached heart, it does not matter which alternative he chooses. If he really wants only the will of God, he cannot miss it. Indeed, if he really prays, he has got it already, before he makes the choice.
Accordingly if we are sincere when we say in the Our Father, “hallowed be Thy name,” we are pronouncing an earnest of the next clause, “Thy kingdom come.” An earnest also of the one after, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” These three prayer acts, whether regarded as acts of praise or petition, are not entirely eschatological in their implication. They can be applied to the immediate and temporal just as they can be applied to the general and eternal. “Hallowed be Thy name” in the Chinese rendering of the Our Father becomes “may all men do homage to Thy name as holy.” By looking toward a time when living people universally worship, the soul is both assuming the power of God and begging the power of God to bring it about.
There is nothing humanistic about this regard for the perfection of mankind on earth; the concern is that all men may unite with the activity of grace, and so give perfect worship to God. Back once more to the breathing in and breathing out. Granted that God’s spirit informs the human soul, the human soul can breathe the prayer of the blessed in heaven and mean all that “hallowed be Thy name” implies.
Another facet to the subject, and one that has margins of contact with those considered above, is the Quietist misconception mentioned already. Without adopting a heretical position, people can take the view that if God’s will is always present in their lives, doing its perfect work anyway, the best thing is to let it run on without any help from them. The direction here is straight toward fatalism.
As propounded originally by the circle of mystics and recollects, the tenets of Quietism looked innocent enough. Indeed, they looked highly spiritual and sanctifying. The human will must be so wholly surrendered to God’s will that it desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and does nothing except under the direct action of grace. Nothing much wrong with that. But in fact it was heading for supine inertia. “God’s will” became a fetish; man’s will became a cipher. Orthodoxy would have been preserved had a measure of human cooperation been demanded, but cooperation was held to be quite enough in the way of operation to spoil the work of God. The soul was required not to transform self but to annihilate self. Prayer for the Quietist was not just a matter of keeping the emotions still so as to simplify the act of the will; it was a matter of eliminating activity of any sort, whether of the emotions or of the will.
Madame Guyon was to write of the soul perfected by grace that “it is as little possible for it to distinguish itself from God as God distinguishes Himself from it.” On such a showing, the human individual, when made holy, has no longer any real existence of his own. He is not an entity working for the fulfillment of God’s will; he is not even a passive instrument wanting to be used; he is a vacuum, an emptiness. If God cannot distinguish Himself from such a soul, He is clearly not the God of Christian teaching. At least the Quietist errors had this effect: they showed us the necessity of using our wills as wills. The highest thing a human will can do is freely to will God’s will.
If this means anything at all, it means that there must be occasions in life when it is not enough to sit back and wait for God’s will to roll over one. There are times when, for the very fulfillment of God’s will, the initiative has to be taken. In the event, the action may prove to have been misplaced or untimely, but this is not to say that it ought never to have been taken. “It is God’s will,” says Bossuet, “that we should do nothing listlessly,” and one of the dangers of too much abandonment is that we come to do everything listlessly. How not — if we feel guilty about doing anything at all?
Any school of spirituality that jettisons the moral autonomy of man, even if it is in the name of giving greater glory to God, is bound to fall foul of Catholic teaching. For us, the way of giving glory to God is by being ourselves — by willing and acting in harmony with the vocation God has given us. Such action is free and individual. If we so sacrificed our liberty to choose God’s will, we would be machines and would give only a mechanical
glory to God. If we so sacrificed our individuality as to become merged in a kind of general human fluid, where would be the doctrine of a personal redemption?
Although the theology of Quietism is dead, the Quietist way of thinking is very much alive. More alive now, since the arrival upon our horizon of nuclear weapons of destruction, than twenty or thirty years ago. People imagine it to be a virtue to wait upon the will of God long after the will of God has been suggested to them. There is no merit in passivity as such. “Do unto others,” our Lord says, “as you would have them do unto you.”34 He speaks about positive undertakings more often than about getting out of the stream of life. Talents must be traded with, wheat must be sown and harvested, leaven must spread. “I have finished the work,” He was able to say at the end, “Thou gavest me to do.”35 “Indeed, this was the Son of God,”36 could be said of Him when He had finished; “He did all things well.”37
We have to do more than merely accept the evil in the world; we have to resist it. Yet to judge from a trend in present-day spiritual writing, stagnation is better than sticking one’s neck out. Are we never to initiate, but always to allow other people’s initiations to dominate? Are we never to reform, but always to assume that God’s will is directed against change? Are we never to correct offenders on the grounds that offenses are the due expressions, in a fallen world, of God’s permissive will?
Put in these terms, the way of passive endurance may look ridiculous, but there is not a very clear line of demarcation between the passive endurance which is of God and that which is sheer sloth. It would be sad if we of this period in history, of all periods, evaded our responsibilities because of a muddle-headed understanding of the will of God. More will be said about this in the concluding chapter.
Prayer and the Will of God Page 8
