Nothing, moreover — to return to the fairytale theme — is in the strictest sense “lost.” If it goes astray, it can always be found again. It can be restored to where it belongs. The American term is perhaps better here: the office represents the lost and found. There is a place for everything, even for the stray. Even those who are not in a state of grace and who have no intention of saving their souls are, although in a somewhat oblique way, fulfilling the will of God. God has not had that purpose in mind — that they should rebel against Him — but the fact that they have used their freedom to choose, even though they have chosen wrong, is witness to His will.
In one of the sapiential books, we read of God’s wisdom as “reaching from end to end mightily and ordering all things with gentleness.”46 Nothing is so mightily commanded that liberty gives way to compulsion; nothing is so gently arranged that evil is condoned by divine softness. God is always ready to forgive, but He does not take an easygoing view of sin. Nor is anything left to chance. There is a destination reserved for every created thing. It is odd that, although we are reminded about this by our Lord when He talks about the very hairs on the head being numbered, the blades of grass and the lilies having their separately appointed place in God’s mind, and not even a bird’s death going unnoticed,47 we still think in terms of mass-production. Consequently, we think that it cannot greatly matter to God what goes on in my brain, which is only one of countless million others. It matters so much that He surrounds us day and night with evidences of His will, each of them designed to recall us to the unique providence He is exercising in our regard. On His side, nothing is lacking for the perfect fulfilment of His plan. On our side, all that is lacking is perfect cooperation.
The graces resulting from this will-to-will service could be numbered, subdivided, graded, and pigeonholed almost indefinitely. Indeed, every virtue must have God’s will as its reason for existing in the first place — let alone for its perfect exercise. So rather than overcharge this aspect of the subject, we can conclude with a look at the effect of surrender upon the most important of them all.
With regard to charity in relation to God, thought of simply as worship, identification with the divine will assumes both the desire to give glory and the actual execution. Whether the prayer that the individual soul feels it to be God’s will that he should practice is vocal or mental, distracted or clear, private or public, the principle holds good equally: the intention is to serve God’s will. If the intention looks more to the individual’s will than God’s, then the charity in the prayer is to that extent lessened. It is clear that those who take the precept in its fullest sense and seriously set themselves to love the Lord their God with their whole heart, mind, and soul have already envisaged God’s will and admitted it into their lives. Just as in God, His will and His love are one, so in us, the response to His will is the measure of our love.
Turning now to the other aspect of charity, love of neighbor, we can apply our earlier conclusions about the unity and simplicity of God’s purpose. The theme of the Benedicite and Laudate of the Old Testament is repeated for us, and in the warmer terms of human relationship, in the New. From our Lord Himself we get the symbols of the vine, the flock, the field, and the net — each one showing the work of the unit within the whole; each one illustrating the corporate nature of sanctification. In the letters, we have St. Paul teaching the same doctrine: different members of the one body working together for the life of the whole; a diversity of gifts but the same spirit; a breaking down of barriers between Jew and gentile, bond and free, Greek and Roman. All are one in Christ.48
Every time we recite the Creed, we acknowledge the unity and catholicity of our Faith. Charity is implied; simplicity is implied. But does the Creed lead on to logical performance? It should. Assuming that we see God’s will to be working in the unity and catholicity of the Church, we should not find it too difficult to rise to the next step. Unless we do — unless we base our love of neighbor upon the love and will of God — we shall be selective in our charity to others. Seeing the relationship between every human being and his neighbor, seeing also the human family in relation to God’s will, we both deepen the quality and extend the scope of our charity.
Instead of driving a wedge between the twofold expressions of charity, the Christian who is himself integrated expresses charity in simplicity. He does not have to be told by a theologian that charity is undivided; he knows it. Books and sermons may be needed to tell him how to apply his charity, but his experience of God’s will is all that is needed to tell him of its immanence.
Chapter 14
Christ Our Model
As though to make perfectly sure that the human souls whom He had made in His own image would not miss it, God revealed His will in the form of a living person, divine and human at the same time: His Son. At the Incarnation, the Word of God, which is the same as the will of God, took flesh; our Lord is the will of God personified. So He is at once infinite love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and perfection. He is also the way by which we go to the Father, and the life by which we live. Incorporated into His life at Baptism, we are members of His Body and sharers of His spirit. For the guiding of our mortal affairs, He is our model or exemplar. Shaping our lives according to His example and teaching, we have absolute assurance that we are fulfilling the will of God. The questions for us Christians are accordingly: how are His standards to be seen in a world that has greatly changed since His time, and how are they to be valued and applied even when they are seen?
Thinking of our Lord simply as setting the pattern of our faith, and leaving until later an examination of some of the things He said, we have even before His birth a clear enough hint as to the line to be followed in the understanding of His Father’s will.
Prophecy had foretold the Father’s will regarding the Messiah: He was to be born in Bethlehem, His mother was to be a virgin, He was to be a light to the gentiles as well as a savior of His own people. (There were other prophecies as well, relating to His Passion and death, but for the time being, we shall consider only the circumstances surrounding His birth.)
Notice how the providential will of God came to be fulfilled. Mary lived at Nazareth, so on the face of it, there was little chance that Bethlehem would in fact be the place of Christ’s birth. Mary was a virgin, but since she was espoused to Joseph, it might have been thought unlikely that she would become the virgin-mother of the Messiah. Nevertheless, God’s will was moving, and unconscious agents were carrying it out. In Rome, a census of the empire was decreed by Caesar Augustus. On the other side of Palestine, somewhere far to the east, scholars were drawing certain conclusions from their studies. In Bethlehem, wives were becoming pregnant and giving birth. As a consequence of these apparently unrelated happenings, and in spite of what might have been expected, God’s providential designs were exactly realized. Joseph, belonging to David’s line, was required to register at Bethlehem, which was David’s city. Mary, having consented to her vocation as delivered by Gabriel, fulfilled her role of virgin and mother. The first embassy of the gentiles, in the persons of the wise men, recognized our Lord both as King of the Jews and the light of truth for which they had been looking. The Holy Innocents were there to cover with their martyrdom the flight into Egypt.
When people complain of the haphazard nature of their lives, they should think of the apparently haphazard nature of our Lord’s life, and then consider the marshaling of events, motives, and other apparently haphazard factors. It is not only in our Lord’s life that everything was set for the fulfillment of the Father’s will. In our own lives, too, everything is set and ready for our maximum cooperation. We are none of us in the lost-property office by accident. There is no such thing as, in the accepted sense, coincidence. Would you say it was coincidence that when Domitian sentenced to death those who claimed royal descent, he did not include those of David’s line whose poverty and obscurity ruled them out as potential pretenders, and that Joseph’s insignificance as a carpenter was because h
is branch of the family happened to be down on its luck? Would you say it was a coincidence that somebody in Jerusalem happened to have owned a donkey that had never been used to the yoke and that a request for just such a donkey was made to him at a particular moment during the week before the Pasch? That it was a coincidence to meet a man carrying a pitcher on his head and who happened to have a room to let when these facts had been announced beforehand? That a certain rich man had happened to have a tomb ready, and not before occupied, when our Lord’s body was taken down from the Cross?
So the two main mistakes people make when thinking of the providential ways of God are these: first, that the power of the Holy Spirit is brought to bear on some situations and not on others; and second, that when it is brought to bear, it brings an ad hoc decision. We should know that God’s will is not only for the elect, and that when it comes down the scale to us, it is just as much the expression of divine wisdom as ever it was. If there were one Holy Spirit for general councils and another for preparing a catechism class, we would have every excuse for not recognizing the will of God in our own small lives: the will of God would have shrunk almost to invisibility. Fortunately for us, the saints have no monopoly of the will of God. Where the saints have the advantage over us is that, being more ready to cooperate with it, they see it more often.
The second misconception is probably more common — partly because it is easier to think of the Holy Spirit acting as we would act, meeting an emergency with a snap decision, and partly because it is not at all easy to arrive at the right view of it without seeming to compromise free will. The exercise of tracing cause and effect is a hazardous one and, except in cases such as we have considered that relate to known fact, unprofitable. When we apply the process too minutely to our own past, we can become victims of delusion. But allowing for all these drawbacks, there is often good reason to look back and acknowledge the providential handling of what appeared at the time inexplicable or wasteful or disastrous.
Certainly there can be no danger of delusion in accepting present misfortunes, however unpromising they appear, as possible material for future good. You do not have to look only at the next life for the fruition; you can find some surprising reversals of misfortune even in this one. Job’s experience was by no means unique. This is not to say that you must place all your trust in a miraculous switch; you must place all your trust in God. By trusting God to bring you through the immediate trial, you dispose your soul to future graces. The immediate is seldom, if ever, the end of the affair.
If, for instance, this book I am writing is rejected by the publisher, or if the manuscript is destroyed in a file, I shall be disappointed. But I shall know, assuming I keep my wits about me, that out of the thought that has been put into it, a new and better book may emerge. The disappointment will have been a necessary stage, part of the potential. Moreover, if there should be no end-product, and the last to be seen of the present work is a rejection slip or a little heap of ashes, nothing has been wasted. It does not mean that God never intended the book to be written in the first place, and was not helping with His will as page followed page. All it means is that one outcome has been exchanged for another, and that His will prefers this expression rather than that.
One person’s blocked opportunity may liberate a hundred other people’s opportunities — may even, at a different level, liberate some of his own. Our lives are so closely knit with the lives of others, and our own individual experiences are so related to one another, that to imagine we have exhausted our resources must always be wrong. The moment the potential has in fact run out will be the moment when God decides we must die. Until then, we are material on the move, and our movement is having repercussions of which we have not perhaps the faintest idea. It is this thought, the thought of mutual responsibility among the members of Christ’s body, which should keep people from committing suicide. The only really dead end is the taking of one’s own life.
Compare an oil-painting with a piece of tapestry. If the painter is displeased with one of his figures, he can scrape the canvas and paint in another; the original composition has remained; all that has happened is that one figure went wrong and had to be taken out. With the tapestry, it is a different business altogether. If the weaver is dissatisfied, he cannot take out a thread, much less a figure in the group, without affecting the rest of the composition. The weaver has to go on or begin again.
So long as we live, we are committed — committed to the past and the future, to other people and to God. Someone has said (and if nobody has, it is high time somebody did say) that “what you realize after you realize it is the important thing,” and if a man does not follow up his realizations — does not see them as having been made real to him by God for the express purpose of eliciting an act of his own will — he would be better off realizing nothing.
The prayer “Come, Holy Spirit” shows us how the will of God is meant not only to touch every point of our lives from outside but to penetrate and, in the theological sense, “inform” every act of ours on the inside. The “face of the earth,” which has to be renewed, is transformed from within. The apostle does not go about the world imposing God’s will as he would pin a badge; he goes about the world so united with the will of God as to be able to kindle in others “the fire of God’s love.” He does not even go about proclaiming a law, unless it is the law of divine love, which is more a matter of exchange than of rules, but rather, by the help of God’s grace, he tries to teach men to be “‘truly wise and ever rejoice in His consolations, through Christ our Lord.” When he has shown them what true wisdom consists in, where to find true consolations, and how to rejoice in them, he explains to them the rules they have to keep in order to express their service.
“If you love me, keep my commandments.”49 We will to love, but the only proof of our love is the will to obey. What love can there be without submission? So you may say that neither the will nor the love nor the law comes superimposed from without. Even the life of Christ, coming to us from the pages of the Gospel, is more of an inward than an outward reality. It is born in our souls by the grace of a sacrament and developed in us by the grace of prayer and other sacraments. The Christian life does not consist in committing to memory the historical events of the Gospel and re-enacting them; the Christian life consists, rather, in trying to enter into the mind of Christ and living accordingly. The essential Christian purpose is to come closer to the mystery of Christ’s will and model our own human will to that divine pattern.
Such, then, is what we mean when we speak about Christ being our model. His words are for our direction; His acts are for our inspiration and, where possible, imitation; His will is for our identification. “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.”50 Indeed, unless we try to reach out and understand something of the interior relationship between our Lord’s will and the Father, between our Lord’s will and human beings, between our Lord’s will and the created world with all its material furnishings, it is difficult to see how we can in any true sense fulfill our Christian obligation. Without such an understanding, however elementary and (of necessity) incomplete, Christ’s life means no more than a biography. It is true that His teaching provides us with a pattern of behavior, but the experience of Christian history seems to show that a pattern of behavior is not enough. Where Christianity has failed over the centuries is where human wills have refused to fit into the pattern, into the divine will. What is true of the Christian family at large is true of its individual members. When a man says by implication, “Christ lives, now not Christ, but I live instead of Him,” he misses the whole point not only of Christ’s life but of his own.
It comes to this, then — that if the Christian refuses to let himself get involved in the life of Christ (which means in the will of Christ for him and for the world), he cannot expect the pattern to do the work for him. For religion to become alive, its members must contribute. The members contribute in their degree what Christ contributes in His, which is to say that
they must give. They must choose. They must orientate their lives with a specific end in view. The destination as well as the direction and power of movement are given: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.”51
Here we can examine the material that is provided for the twofold work proposed above, the work for the satisfactory execution of which we ask the Holy Spirit’s help. The work is twofold because we look beyond our own personal sanctification (“send forth Thy Spirit and our hearts shall be created”) to the evangelization and sanctification of mankind (“and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth”52). We have as means for the undertaking the Creed and the life and teaching of our Lord. The Church supplies aid with both certainty of interpretation and the graces of the sacraments. How, it might be thought by a visitor from another planet, can we possibly go wrong? Ideally speaking, there should be no discrepancy between man’s Christian beliefs and his engagement in everyday life. But committed to a material world, and spinning out his mortality in time sequences, he is always more or less conscious of his failure here; he deviates from the course laid down.
“Faith,” says Daniélou, “offers a vision of the world which embraces all things in the perspective of God’s plan. God is at work in our midst; we are impelled to be His coworkers.” Yes, but even with this vision and with this impulse, we are at best unprofitable workers. And sometimes hardly coworkers at all. Why do we limp in this service, the service which we know to be worthwhile and which cannot, of its very nature, ask more of us than we can bear to give? Surely it is because we have, again, never fully made our own the implications of the mystery of the Incarnation. If to us Christ were really the exemplar, really as compelling as He was, say, to Zacchaeus or Mary Magdalene or Paul, would we not accept faith’s offer of “a vision of the world which embraces all things in the perspective of God’s plan” and apply, day in and day out for the whole of our lives, the lessons of that vision?
Prayer and the Will of God Page 11
