Prayer and the Will of God

by Dom Hubert Van Zeller

  So it would be a complete mistake for me to imagine that I have somehow got to calm down the just wrath of a grieved parent, or that I have to wait a while for his anger to cool and for his sadness at my failure to lessen with the passing of time. God and His love are one thing, and that one thing never alters. God loves me when I have not sinned, but He loves me also when I have. He would not be God if He stopped loving me. If He could stop loving me, it would mean that God was divided — that His divinity was in one part of Him and His love in another, and that He could go on being divine while deciding at the same time to stop loving. It would be heresy to hold this.

  But for goodness’ sake, do not get the doctrine wrong. God does not love you to sin (that is the last thing He wants you to do), but He does love you although you sin. What it amounts to is that His love is there, waiting for you, and that even if you are in such a bad mood that you refuse to ask for pardon, He is still just as ready to give it to you when you do. The instant you have responded to grace, humbling yourself and admitting your fault, you are fully back again in His love as though you had never left it. In your obstinacy, it was not His love that had left you, but your love that had left him

  If you try to understand how this works, you come to a much truer knowledge of God and of His love for you. We have just seen that with your repentance the father-and-son relationship is perfectly restored. Not a cloud to darken it. Now, it is not as though God is saying, “I won’t think about it; I’ll forget it. We both know you have offended me, but we’ll pretend it never happened. We must start again, and see if we can’t get along better.” God is not that kind of father, the let’s-pretend kind. Infinite Wisdom cannot either “forget” or “remember”: everything is spread out there before Him in His eternity.

  Nor can He try an experiment. He cannot say: “This getting along better together may or may not work out. I don’t know. We’ll simply have to see. We must do our best.” God knows everything all the time, and it would be silly to think of Him either as blotting things out of His memory or veiling His knowledge of the future. What He blots out is our guilt, not His knowledge of our guilt. He is not blindfolded about the future; it is only we who cannot be sure what response we are going to give to the grace that will certainly be there for us to use.

  Now, does not this make God’s love all the more wonderful? The perfection of friendship lies not in pretending that nothing had ever gone wrong, or ever would go wrong again, but in being always open to full friendship, whatever happens. It should be a great help to know that God never bears a grudge against a sinner, is never suspicious, and never loses confidence in the sinner’s ability to return to Him.

  No question here of God’s taking a nice mild view of sin. God is infinite goodness, and sin is the dead opposite of goodness. God could no more belittle sin than He could belittle love. It is just because God is love that sin is unlove — is rebellion, is pride, is evil. If sin hurt us only, and were not an offense against God, it would not matter quite so much. But because it attacks the infinite goodness and love of God, sin is the vilest thing in the world.

  So when we talk about God’s “hating” sin, we should not think of God’s feeling bitter about it, as a man might loathe something that got in the way of his plans or of his happiness. Nothing can get in the way of God’s plan or of His happiness. God’s will cannot be altered by human beings, nor can God’s happiness be upset by anything that man can do. No, God is not shocked, soured, or stung to malice by the sins committed against Him. These are simply human moods and instincts which it would be wrong to think that God could feel. The evil of sin lies in the rejection of God, not in any feelings that it stirs.

  In the Passion, our Lord’s feelings were allowed to suffer infinite pain, and it was because of our sins that this happened, but we may not believe that we can, by our sins, cause sadness to God, for He is now in the eternal bliss of heaven. If we could sadden God, it would mean that He was even now at the mercy of man. If the Holy Trinity were not safe from the malice of man, from your sins and mine, it would be impossible to claim for the three Persons that They enjoy infinite happiness in the love of one another.

  So it is quite a wrong way of looking at it to think of God in heaven gazing reproachfully down upon the human race and saying, “I feel terribly hurt when these people sin, and if they go on like this, I won’t love them any more.” The right way to look at it is to think of Him as saying, “I want these people to be good because I love them, and when they are good, they are being like me. When they are committing sin, they are being the very opposite of me. When in sin, they are not worthy of my love. But my love is so great that, worthy or not, they can always count on it.”

  Lord, forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors. We have sinned, but we count on Your mercy. We do not want to continue in our sin. Lord, make us worthy of Your great love.

  And lead us not into temptation. Get used to the idea that, all through your life, temptation will never be far away. Since the Fall of man, it is part of life itself, and only our Lord and His blessed Mother have been proof against it. But even they had to endure its heat.

  Temptation is not sin; it is only the air in which sin is born. Temptation is the climate that makes sin feel at home. If you keep away from the occasions of sin, filling your lungs with air that is purified by grace, the evil that lies in temptation will not infect you. In fact, you will see in it a chance of practicing self-control.

  St. James goes so far as to say that we should count it all joy when we fall into various temptations.15 Why — if temptation is so dangerous to our souls? Because without the test of temptation, the strength of virtue would not show up. It is temptation that throws the soul back upon God’s grace as the only way of escape.

  So it is only when you go looking for the foul air, or when you choose to walk about in it when its clouds roll in upon you, that you can no longer be sure of making use of God’s protecting grace. The grace will be there all right, but in your divided state of mind, you may not want to be protected by it.

  Lord, lead me away from temptation. Let me not risk an occasion of sin. When opportunities of offending You come upon me, give me warning in time and show me the way out of them.

  But deliver us from evil. Amen. Just as there are two kinds of temptation (the kind we cannot escape altogether but do not want, and the deliberate kind we lay ourselves open to), so there are two kinds of evil (although same would say there are a thousand kinds of evil because there are a thousand kinds of devil in us, each one greedy for its own particular kind of satisfaction). Anyway, there are two main ones as far as committing sin is concerned, and care must be taken not to confuse the two, or we find ourselves tangled up in scruples.

  The easiest way to see the difference between mortal and venial sin is to compare it with the sort of quarrels that happen between friends. Two people disagree. One of them may say to himself as he walks away from the scene of the argument, “We have had a row, but it won’t make any difference to our friendship. I don’t want to break things up. I am all for getting my own way now, but by tomorrow it will have blown over and we’ll be getting along together as before.” The other one may say to himself, “Well, that’s finished it. I never want to see him again. Look around for someone else.” Venial sin would be like the first man’s attitude toward the break: it is a thing of the moment, and can be healed in no time. Mortal sin is like the second way of looking at it: the relationship has collapsed, and there is a turning away that is expected to be final.

  Lord, deliver us from evil. Deliver us from both kinds, venial and mortal sin, but especially from the evil of mortal sin. Compared with the evil of mortal sin, all the other evils that we can think of (disease, war, poverty, loneliness, concentration camps, death) are not so very serious after all. In every human distress, the soul can still love God, but in the evil of mortal sin, the soul is dead — although even now, putting it at its worst and supposing that we have deliberately committed
a mortal sin, we should know that there is still a way back. If a friend can say, “I want nothing more to do with him,” and then change his mind, he can ask his friend to forgive him and put things right; the two can get along again as though nothing had happened. The quarrel, with its narrow escape, may even make the guilty one more grateful than he was before, more thoughtful, more careful about not losing his friend’s affection. It will certainly make him sorry for having failed the other person and turned against him.

  Deliver us from evil, Lord, and we will try to come back with a humble, penitent, and grateful heart. If Your mercy were not infinite, and if Your grace were not stronger than our wickedness, this last clause of the Our Father would not have been given us. The one great thought that we can take away with us from these notes about the Our Father is the thought of Your never-failing mercy. You have been a merciful Father in redeeming us from Original Sin. You have been a merciful Father in forgiving us again and again for our actual sins. Our Father, we trust in Your mercy. Amen.

  Chapter 5

  Distracted Prayer

  If you have gotten this far in the book, you are likely saying to yourself something like this: “Yes, I know. It ought not be difficult to pray. And when I am stuck, I can read over the Our Father slowly, praying about each sentence as it comes along. I can do the same to the Hail Mary or to the words of the Mass. But the plain fact is my mind wanders off every time I pray, and unless I am rapping out prayers like a machine-gun, I cannot be sure that I am doing any praying at all. And the worst of it is that these prayers which rattle along as fast as my tongue can speak them do not seem to mean very much. They become automatic. How can I pray without distractions?”

  The answer is very simple: you cannot pray without distractions. Except our Lord and our Lady, nobody ever has. You can pray without deliberately choosing to distract yourself, but you cannot pray for long without unwanted distractions coming in and apparently spoiling your prayer. The word apparently must be looked at here because the harm done to prayer by distractions that are not deliberate is only apparent. The real value of the prayer remains even when the flow of talk to God is interrupted by other voices that you are trying to shut out.

  Take an example from everyday life. You put on a long piece of music that you mean to hear right through to the end. You lean forward and listen. But while you are settling in and enjoying it, a door bangs or a telephone rings or someone shouts at you from the garden. Now, these noises may spoil your enjoyment of the music, but they do not stop it from playing. They distract your attention, but only if you decide to see who has banged the door, called up on the telephone, or shouted from outside do you voluntarily switch your mind away from the sounds you had set out to hear. A deliberate distraction does, of course, spoil the prayer, but it would have to be as deliberate as turning off the music. So long as you are still trying to pray, it is the same as still trying to listen to the music; you pay as little attention as possible to the noises that are going on around you, knowing that the noises of themselves cannot stop the music from playing.

  This means that when you are praying, you do not have to keep reminding yourself that you are praying or the prayer stops. When a distraction comes, you should try to call your thoughts back by telling God once again what you have set yourself to do. “Lord, I am supposed to be praying, and I have been thinking of other things. Please get me on to thinking of You again.”

  But if you were expected to repeat all during your prayer, “I am now saying my prayers, I am now saying my prayers, I am now saying my prayers,” you would only be thinking about yourself and not about God. The fact that you mean to pray is quite enough to keep the important part of the prayer going. It is like taking a trip by air. You do not have to repeat all the time you are in the plane, “I am going somewhere by air” — as if the engine would stop if you forgot to. In prayer, you mean to mount into the sky of God’s love, and you do not come down again until the journey is over.

  So the real trouble about distractions is not that they wreck the prayer from God’s point of view, but that they discourage you and get you to think about yourself. Try not to let your prayer go round and round in circles with you as the center of it. Your prayer is meant to go out from you toward God. The more you try to love Him and forget about yourself, the better. Distractions do not stop you from loving God in your prayer, but thinking about yourself does. Even though you will never be able to leave all thought of yourself behind when you pray — because, after all, it is you who are praying — you should try to make the thought of God come first.

  One good thing about distractions, whether they take the form of thinking about yourself or about anything else, is that they make you humble. After a prayer that has been full of distractions, you feel you are, so far as the service of God goes, a pretty miserable specimen. The question now is what effect will this have? If it discourages you from going on with praying, it means that you have failed in the test (and that you are a pretty miserable specimen). If it makes you say, “This shows how useless I am at prayer, but God can get me to pray better if I give Him half a chance by responding more to His grace,” then it means that the test has worked and that you are learning to depend less upon yourself than upon God.

  Besides, what would happen if you could always pray without distractions? You would feel you were two-thirds a saint already. You would say, “This is easy; I needn’t bother about it anymore.” You would think yourself enormously superior to those unfortunate souls whose prayer was nothing but one distraction after another. In other words, you would be the Pharisee, and your beautifully undistracted prayer would not be nearly so pleasing to God as the muddled, creaking, stuttered, disjointed prayer of the publican.

  Another point worth thinking about while we are on this subject of distractions is that wherever the novelty of a thing wears off, you are bound to get a rather humdrum and stale performance. Seeing an adventure film for the first time, you get a great thrill, but if you saw it day after day for a month, you would get no thrill at all. Now, in the first place, you do not pray in order to get thrills but in order to praise God. But even if getting thrills was one of the main things about prayer, they would simply not come. So, although it would be wrong to pray in a slapdash sort of way, letting your prayer go stale by sheer carelessness, you must remember that anything which you do regularly, and which you have come to know well and which is now a settled habit, cannot have the feeling of freshness about it that it may have had at first.

  Perhaps you may wonder why, if it is not meant to last, God allows you to have that sense of freshness in the beginning. “Doesn’t it only lead to disappointment?” you may ask. “And wouldn’t it be better if devotion had not come my way in the first place? I would then have known what I was in for — a heavy sort of prayer that feels like a waste of time.” The answer to that one is roughly this: we human beings are such selfish creatures that if God did not give us a liking for prayer’s consolations (the enjoyment of doing something rather special, the satisfaction of getting along rather well, the sheer pleasure of being in His presence undisturbed), we would probably not pray at all. God draws us by what the books call “sensible devotion” (which means the nice warm glow that sometimes comes along with grace) so that we should make a fixed and faithful practice of what was just a pleasurable experience.

  Incidentally, He does the same, you will find, when He wants us to get in the way of practicing charity. To serve the sick, to give things to the poor, to be helpful to old people: such acts of kindness make us feel fine when we do them for the first time. But they get stale, and then we are all the more faithful and charitable because they feel so stale. The first feelings, you see, do not matter so much as the settled desire. And where you have a settled desire, you seldom have exciting feelings. True charity, which is serving God and serving others, can be quite without excitement. In the matter of charity, it is direction that counts — pointing your love toward God.

  The ques
tion to get back to every time is why are we praying? Are we praying to please God or to please ourselves? It ought not to be too hard for us to answer this question in the way God wants it answered. And again (because, in the long run, it amounts to the same thing) why are we practicing charity? Are we serving others to please God or to please ourselves? Our aim should be to pray not because we love prayer but because we love God, to serve others not because we love serving but because we love God. In doing each of these things, praying and serving, we shall find ourselves falling short of the ideal. Provided we keep aiming at the ideal, we need not be discouraged at falling short. Of course, in our prayers we shall catch ourselves being more anxious to get things out of God than to let Him get things out of us. Of course, in our works of charity we shall catch ourselves being more eager to impress with our service than to please with our charity. But these are just distractions to be brushed aside. All the time we are really trying to focus on God.

  By way of rounding off this chapter, here is an illustration that may help to explain the workings of distractions both in works of prayer and in works of charity. Someone is taking a close-up photograph of you with a flash. In the sudden bright light from the camera, what do you see? You do not see either the camera or the bulb. You are, for the moment, blinded by the flash. But the camera has seen you, and has recorded what it wanted to record. Now when, by prayer, you look into the light and the love of God, you do not see what you might expect to see. The light is too strong for the eyes of your soul, and you do not see anything at all. But God has accepted the direction of your gaze, and it is His side of the business that matters. You must be content to leave the photographing to Him, the developing and printing to Him, the success of the finished copy to Him. All that is wanted of you is that you keep still and try to be natural.