Prayer and the Will of God

by Dom Hubert Van Zeller

  Part 2

  The Will of God

  Chapter 8

  Understanding God’s Will

  There can hardly be a better practice in the spiritual life than that of meeting everything as an expression of the will of God. Phrases such as “if God wills” and “it must be the will of God” and “may God’s will go with you” come naturally to the devout. People in certain traditions of Christian life say these things all day long and mean them. God’s will becomes for them the standard of everyday decisions and the background against which life happens.

  Nothing furthers the supernatural point of view so effectively as the cultivation of such a habit. It can be seen as an extension of the Our Father, as an identification with the disposition of Christ, as the application of “I came not to do my own will, but the will of my Father who is in heaven” to our own human concerns. It can be made to sum up the whole of our Christian service. But “God’s will” is not just a magic formula, a password that opens all the gates, a label to be stuck onto luggage that need not be thought about for the rest of the journey. God’s will, in other words, is not a superstition.

  God’s will: it can mean so much — and so little. We accept as God’s will the outbreak of a revolution; the breaking of a dam, which means the destruction of homes and harvests and lives; the loss of a leader or of someone we have loved personally. We accept also as God’s will a tiresome interruption, the missing of a train, an obstinate tap, an alarm that fails to go off. There is nothing wrong in accepting such circumstances as manifestations of God’s will — indeed we should train ourselves to do so — but we must be careful to avoid the misconceptions that would rob the exercise of its value. Even granted that we really mean what we say when we hail an event as God’s will, it is important that we should mean what is right.

  In the first place, it is a mistake to imagine that the disastrous is the most fitting occasion for the doctrine’s application. The implication would be that God is forever planning horrors for mankind and that by recognizing them as coming from Him, we can at least prevent them from being any worse. It pays God no compliment to assume that He is responsible for everything unpleasant that happens to us. Much of the unpleasantness we suffer is entirely our own fault, and allowing that much of it may come from the malice and stupidity of others, we do wrong to put all the blame on God. Later in this study we shall see how God permits evil while He wills good. We should guard against concentrating on what He permits to the exclusion of what He wills.

  While it may be easier to see the will of God in what is painful than in what is pleasurable it is nevertheless true that God designs us more for happiness than for sadness. Sadness is a negation of happiness; it is not something that exists in its own right. Sadness may be very necessary to us, and in this sense it can be looked upon as a good, but it is not something to be aspired to and enjoyed as a positive possession. So it is strange that we should connect it with the will of God more often than we connect happiness with the will of God. “I suppose I have to accept this trial as God’s will,” we say with a sigh. Do we so readily shout with joyous recognition of God’s will when something happens that pleases us? Gratitude gets just as near to the will of God as resignation.

  It is important, then, to think of God’s will as something positive, as a vital force with which we can become identified, and not merely as something restrictive and imposed in virtue of God’s prerogative. In our recognition of God’s will, it would be something of a waste to stop short at bowing to the inevitable. God’s will should be an invitation, a challenge to the service of love. Once we grasp the truth that God wills man’s happiness, we ought to be able to hail joy as the gift of God, as an incentive to recollection, as among the clearest indications of divine providence.

  Another trap that lies open in the estimation of how God’s will touches our affairs is the view we grow up with of God Himself. If we are honest with ourselves, do we not regard Him as one who maneuvers us into positions that suit His plan and from which we cannot escape except by His miraculous intervention? The misconception arises partly from the false idea of prayer that we learn as children, partly from the idiom of piety that looks more to the extraordinary than to the ordinary ways of grace, and partly from our quite understandable tendency to judge the mind of God by what we know of our own.

  First, what are we told about prayer? We are given to understand that it will get us out of every difficulty. From our earliest infancy, the belief is drummed into us that if we repeat our petitions often enough, we shall get what we want. Faith and perseverance: armed with these two we cannot miss. Now, all this is perfectly true, but not in the sense that we normally understand it. Prayer does get us out of every difficulty — by so building up our inner reserves that we meet every difficulty and rise above it. If we repeat our petitions often enough, we do get what we want — because we come to want God’s will even more than we want an answer to the particular petition we are making. Given faith and perseverance, we cannot miss — since in proportion as these qualities deepen, we get closer to our true goal, which is God.

  Sometimes, it is true, the more obvious meaning of the doctrine is verified. We pray, and the obstacle vanishes. We place complete confidence in the power of God to work a miracle, and the miracle (to everyone’s surprise, including our own) happens. We make up our minds never to give up asking, come what may, and after a while, we are rewarded with exactly what we have asked for. Instances of this sort are happily common: they strengthen our belief in the power of prayer and provide occasions for showing gratitude to God. The thing to remember is that such examples of cause and effect are not the only ones that prove the value of prayer, and that those which show it less clearly are evidence of greater faith, greater love, greater trust and generosity.

  The next source of misunderstanding is the peculiar phraseology of popular devotion. Printed prayers, hymns, exhortations from the pulpit, little ferverinos that we read in letters from religious men and women: all seem to suggest that the ways of God belong to a quite different world from the one we know, and that if we are to tap the sources of the spirit, we must use a formula we would never dream of using in our dealings with people. It is true, of course, that the order of grace does not operate according to the laws of nature, but at the same time there must be an affinity between the two, or we would never begin to understand the order of grace at all.

  Speaking about the way in which grace works, our Lord uses the illustration of seed growing to maturity in the field. The farmer sows, goes home and attends to other things, comes back at the proper time, sees how the development has been getting on, and eventually reaps. The implication here is that the dealings of God with man follow a more or less accepted course, and that only on special occasions do they deviate into the extraordinary. Yet if we went by the idiom of piety, we would be assuming a different manifestation altogether. We would look for God’s will in the spectacular, await God’s mercy in the dramatic, expect God’s peace to reveal itself in placid contentment.

  The trouble is that we have our own ideas about how God’s will is to be revealed, and since these ideas are colored by self-interest, they are almost always wrong. Like Naaman the Syrian, we instinctively leap to the grandiose, picturing to ourselves a sensational cure of our particular leprosy, when in fact God operates in a commonplace setting and through materials without glamor.21 The error is a not unusual one: James and John fell into it and were corrected by our Lord, who called them “sons of thunder.”22 If we turned more often to the Gospel for our cue as to how God’s will operates, we would get nearer to the truth than by studying the candy-coated opinions of the devout.

  A missionary prays for the grace of martyrdom. Fine. Ideally speaking, and all things being equal, there is nothing much higher that he could pray for. But what if it is emotionally and not ideally speaking? What if all things are not equal? And in fact, they never are. Grace infallibly comes in answer to the missionary’s prayer, but it
is not the grace expected. Perhaps he is sent home to the mother house to do the accounts or to answer the door. Not at all the martyrdom he wanted, not at all the heroism he pictured to himself. But a grace nevertheless, and the will of God nevertheless.

  Or take a less obvious example illustrating the same theme. A wife prays that her alcoholic husband be released from his slavery to drink. Nothing can possibly be wrong with that. For the husband, drink is an evil, and she is praying that he be no longer tempted. Grace, again, infallibly comes. But not necessarily in the form of a physical cure. The man does not suddenly find himself disgusted at the sight of a bottle. The smell of liquor does not put him off his food. What happens is that something happens inside his character; he is given a chance of seeing more clearly and acting more resolutely. He is perfectly free to act upon or reject the grace. The attraction to drink may remain as powerful as ever, but there is an added strength with which to meet it.

  Now, say this man fails, and goes on drinking with undiminished purpose. Is the wife to assume that her prayer has been fruitless? Not at all. What she should do in this case is to see that no obstacles are put in the way of the ordinary course of her husband’s cure. If she is driving the man to drink by nagging at him, she is counting too much on a miracle when she prays that he may give it up. It cannot be too much insisted that the grace of God, which is the same as the will of God, comes to us normally through normal channels. Grace builds upon nature; it does not jump over it unless, for some reason, God wills a miracle. The best preparation for supernatural intervention is the right use of the natural. Where ordinary means are provided, ordinary means should be employed. It is when ordinary means are not provided that we can start thinking about miracles. It is comforting to reflect that whether ordinary or extraordinary, all means directed by a right intention toward good come under the providence of God. God’s will does not have to wait for the heavens to part before it declares itself.

  Now, for the third of our mistaken approaches to the subject — the tendency to read God’s mind by comparison with our own. Experience of our mental processes shows us a directing organ that is highly variable. We change our minds every few minutes, we come under the influence of other minds, we are never absolutely sure what our mind on any given subject really is, we make up our minds on the spur of the moment to meet a particular situation, there are subjects about which we genuinely believe ourselves to have a completely open mind, and there are whole areas of life in relation to which we have no mind at all. (How often in the day do we say, “It doesn’t interest me” and “I don’t mind”?) God’s mind does not work in this way.

  God does not change. He is eternally the same. If God could change His mind, He would stop being God. God is never swayed by our prayers as we are swayed by the pleadings of fellow human beings.

  Yet we talk as though the intensity of our faith were able to influence the mind of God. Our prayers cannot be stronger than God’s decisions, or God would have to abdicate in favor of His creatures.

  It is perhaps here, in this matter of the otherness of God’s mind from ours, that the source of all our confusion lies. If we could grasp what is meant by the everlasting sameness of God, we would get a better idea of how His will operates in the world and in our own souls. We would understand how His mercy is always waiting for the sinner to repent, how His presence is always with us, how His love is the only reason there is any love in us at all, how impossible it would be to misplace whatever trust we put in Him.

  Not only can God’s mind never change, but His love cannot change either. We human beings possess a different kind of heart. Our hearts are as variable as our minds. But with God, His love is the same as His will — eternal and unchanging. Human beings love now one person, now another. Sometimes they love God, and then another love comes along and the love of God dies down. It is one of our sad human limitations that there is room in the heart for only a certain amount of love. Love in this life is incomplete; we are physically and emotionally incapable of loving everybody indiscriminately all the time.

  But with God this is not the case. God does not change toward people as they change toward Him and toward one another. With Him there is no division or sequence of operation as regards love. And because His love and His will are one, His infinite and universal love must mean an infinite and universal will toward the good of man.

  The implications of this touch us at every point in our lives, at every waking and sleeping moment. It means that loving us as He does, and in virtue of His infinite wisdom knowing exactly what is best for us, God never stops willing our highest happiness. In all that we do, God wants us to aspire to the perfect happiness that is His alone to give. Our Lord tells us to ask “that our joy may be full.”23 It is important that we appreciate the attitude of God toward His creatures, establishing firmly in our minds that His love and His will are one, because very often we follow our Lord’s injunction to ask and are rewarded with no sort of joy at all. If God is forever willing our highest happiness, how is it we taste so little of it? If God is almighty, can He not bring about our happiness more often — especially when we ask him in His Son’s name to do so?

  The answer to such misgivings is seen at once if again we compare God’s way of loving with our way of loving, God’s way of willing with our way of willing. In our case, there are division, opposition, starting and finishing. In God’s case, everything is one, and there is no beginning or ending.

  Take first our human way of acting where love and making decisions are involved, and then see how God’s way is bound to be different. Say you have a mother who loves, devotedly but injudiciously, her son. The love may be lasting and self-sacrificing, but because it is human, it will be vulnerable. The son pleads, and the mother gives in. The mother may know in her heart that it is a mistake to give in, but her love is in opposition to her judgment. So in consenting to her son’s demand, she is willing for him the lesser good.

  In the case of God’s love for us, the situation is quite different. His will cannot oppose His love because they are the same thing. He cannot “give in” to a mistaken course of action on the grounds that love excuses everything. Yet is not this what we imagine Him to be doing all the time, what we hope He will do next time we pray for something we want very much?

  When we speak of God’s “consenting” to our request, we should not think of an alteration taking place in the mind of God. It is not as though He had decided in the beginning upon a course of action in our regard, and then, because of the new light shed upon the matter by us in our prayer, is now prepared to fall in with our idea. All along He has willed what was most for our good; the only thing our prayer has done is to bring this will into play. Moreover, this prayer of ours, which has seemed to have had such telling effect, was not an invention of our own; it was inspired by Him in the first place, or we could never have made it. On the occasions when our prayers are heard in the terms requested, what has happened is simply this: God, willing a certain effect to result upon the condition of our praying for it, has given us the light to see what was wanted and the grace to ask for it.

  In view of what has just been said, it should not be difficult to understand how prayer is essentially a rising of the soul to meet the will of God. If we think of it as a drawing of God’s will down from heaven so that it coincides with ours, we think of it mistakenly. Even the specific act of petition, so often insisted upon in the Gospel, is to be valued not for what it manages to get out of God, but for what it gets out of us. It cannot get out of God what God has not from all eternity wanted to give.

  If we look again at the two illustrations given earlier, we can follow, now that the idea has been developed further, a wider application of the same principle. Thus, had the missionary and would-be martyr been granted his opportunity of laying down his life for Christ, he might not have made as good a job of it as in the providence of God he was granted to make of his bookkeeping and answering the door. The merit attached to any work is measured
solely by its conformity to the will of God. God rewards only His own works, the works occasioned by His own will. Nobody understood this more clearly than St. Paul when he proclaimed that without the right motive for doing so, it was no use delivering one’s body to be burned.24 Without charity, St. Paul claimed, martyrdom was vain. And what is charity but the union of man’s will with the will of God?

  Love in this context is not the emotion but the conformity. If we unite our human will with the will of God, we have charity, and we can do that whether we are called to the degree of charity that is crowned by martyrdom or to the less exciting degree that expresses itself in the commonplace. The one qualifying factor is the will of God.

  The second illustration is more complex but the providential exercise of grace can be traced in the same way. The woman prays for her husband, and so far as outward results go, the prayer is fruitless. But who is she to judge? For all she knows, there may be a dozen good reasons, seen only by God, why her husband should be allowed to fail. His present weakness may prove the impulse to a penitence of heart that he never would have arrived at had he jogged along in a state of self-satisfied temperance. Without his repeated lapses, she herself might never have turned to God for help. Her trial of faith and hope, combined with his humiliation, may be giving great glory to God. Others, unknown to this struggling couple, may be receiving grace as the result of the suffering. God has a wider screen presented to Him than man has, and it is a mistake for us to question the often bewildering permissions of His will.

  To conclude this section, and by way of commentary, it is worth quoting from a document found on the body of an unidentified Confederate soldier during the Civil War: