Prayer and the Will of God

by Dom Hubert Van Zeller

  I asked God for strength that I might achieve; I was left weak that I might learn humbly to obey. I asked for power that I might lead, and win the praise of men; I was given weakness that I might feel the need for God. I asked for health that I might do greater things; I was given infirmity that I might do better things . . . I got nothing that I asked for, but everything that I hoped for. Almost despite myself my unspoken prayers were answered. I am among all men most richly blessed.

  Whether or not he was a Catholic, whether or not he had any theology, the writer of those lines had learned what was meant by the phrase “the will of God.” There is always an inwardness to the way in which God treats His creatures, and we are given the grace of faith precisely for the purpose of accepting that inwardness and acting upon it. There is an outward way by which our lives are conducted, but it does not carry us far enough. The external may be, indeed most often is, misleading. So with St. Paul “we look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”25 The will of God is in the things that are seen (or they would not even come to light in the first place) but to see it there is only half the battle — the easier half. The difficult part is seeing the will of God in the obscure, the frustrating, the apparently inconsistent and even contradictory. Difficult but not impossible: we are given the grace to trust.

  Chapter 9

  Responding to God’s Will

  One of the main conclusions to be drawn from what has been said so far is that God’s will shows itself not as a ruling that comes from without, superimposed upon life as a religious extra, but rather as a force in life and through life. It is something the effects of which we see outwardly and acknowledge, but the reality of which is an abiding part of life itself. Indeed it is life itself, because without God’s will, life would not only be meaningless but would be nonexistent. “The wind cannot be seen,” said Socrates, “but can be known by what it does,” and just as the waves on the sea and the leaves on the tree bear witness to the activity of the unseen wind, so the circumstances of our lives and the events of history bear witness to the unceasing and underlying operation of God’s will.

  So if we are looking for God’s will, and we come into this world for nothing else but to search out His will and fulfill it, we know where it is to be found. It is everywhere around us in the happenings of life; it is inside us, drawing our souls toward cooperation and union. Admittedly, we may often find ourselves completely in the dark as to which of two or more courses to follow is the one God wills us to choose, but this does not mean that God’s will is not there for us to discover. God does not suspend His will, as if He were lifting the map out of our hands and telling us to get on with our journey unaccompanied by His grace, because if He did, we would cease to be. It is His will that “conserves” not only us human beings but the whole of creation. The universe (the cosmos and space and all the rest of it) hangs upon the will of God, hinges upon the will of God, proceeds in its pace and rhythm according to the will of God.

  When all this has been said, it can be seen how some ideas are really too big for human language and that the will of God is one of them. To claim that creation “hangs” upon the will of God, “hinges” upon the will of God, is to suggest no more than that God supports the work of His hands as a pear tree supports its fruit and that He keeps the earth spinning around as the mechanism in a fairground keeps the painted wooden horses in musical circulation. But what the will of God does is far more than this. It gives being itself. Take away the will of God, and there is nothing. Not even space.

  Allowing then that words and images are not much use, we still have to use words and images with which to form our ideas because they are the best we have got and they have been given us for this purpose. Perhaps we get closest to the idea of God’s will animating His creation when we think of it as God breathing into the work He does, into the works we see and live with and are. It is the illustration He himself chooses when He begins to reveal Himself in holy scripture. He breathes life.

  The act of breathing is something continuous — not something switched on to meet a particular emergency. It is something largely unnoticed yet absolutely vital. If beyond a certain point we get out of breath, we die. And there is this highly significant feature in the illustration: that for the lungs to breathe in, they must also breathe out. Neither inhaling air nor expelling it is the whole of respiration; life needs both exercises equally. The impulse comes from God; He breathes and gives life. But the impulse must be followed up: we breathe back.

  If you look up the references to breathing in a concordance, you will find enough material for meditation on the will of God to last you a lifetime. Notice particularly how our Lord breathes into the dead body when He restores a life, how He breathes into the apostles when giving them their apostolic powers. Compare this with the priest breathing into the child at Baptism, the bishop when confirming and conferring orders. Life comes with the will of God, and the will of God comes with life. But the beauty of it is that we do not have to wait for the breathing of God’s will; it is going on all the time and in every place. Our true happiness, our holiness, consists in breathing the breath of His will back to Him from whom it comes.

  Seeing the matter from this angle may not greatly affect our set prayers, but it should widen our concept of the function of prayer. By it we should come to a better appreciation of God’s unsleeping interest in our affairs, of the loving concern which is ours for the asking — indeed, which is there even if we fail to ask — and of the manner in which prayer cooperates with the work of God in the guidance of mankind.

  Take an example. Say you are asked to pray that the light of the Holy Spirit may direct the deliberations of a particular assembly. Suppose it is a question of an election or the passing of some important measure. You recite the required prayers and await the result. What is it that you are really expecting to happen? Do you think of it as training, by means of a combined effort of prayer, a beam of light upon the issue to be voted on — and so securing a clear pronouncement of God’s will? Or do you think of it as the development of the Holy Spirit’s life in the assembly, in each member of the assembly and in the body as a whole, so that when a decision comes to be made, there will be a greater desire for God’s will than there was before? Granted that you are ready to see God’s will in the outcome anyway, you must surely be approaching the subject at a deeper level when considering it in the second of these two ways. The set form of the prayer may be the same either way you approach it, but to see the work of the Holy Spirit as an overall influence, as the will of God becoming clearer in the measure that the voters yield themselves to it, would seem to hold more promise of fulfillment than to see it as pinpointing the agenda sheet and spotlighting the voting space.

  The fact once established that God’s will is the source of all that is, there should be no great difficulty in linking up human affairs with their origin. This is effected by the virtue of religion. The word religion derives from the Latin re-ligo: “I bind back.” Practicing religion we bind ourselves back to where we belong. We have been separated from God by sin, and religion puts us right again; we rejoin our proper element. In this true environment, everything speaks to us of God, everything represents God’s will. The more we come to live our religion, the clearer we come to hear the voice of His revelation and the quicker we become in recognizing the representations of His will for what they really are.

  A man is stricken with polio. It is the will of God, coming to Him independently of himself and from outside. But more significantly, the will of God is inside him, inviting his cooperation with the affliction. “You must accept it as God’s will,” his friends tell him. Yes, but it is going to make a big difference how he accepts it. Must he think of it as God’s willing him to suffer? He can if he likes, but a more helpful emphasis is given to the trial if he thinks of God’s willing away inside his soul and giving him the gra
ce to meet his polio in its true terms.

  A man loses the ignition key of his car and cannot start for work. He reminds himself that it must be the will of God. “God has planned from all eternity,” he tells himself, “that I should lose the ignition key on this particular morning when I am in a hurry to get to the office.” There is nothing theologically wrong with this, but the stress is on the wrong thing. Better to say, “God has willed from all eternity that I should rise to this sort of annoyance, and this is what I mean to do; my will inside myself is accordingly in line with His.” And incidentally, it is the will of God that the friend whom he telephones, asking to be picked up, should apply the same principle. The wife who is searching behind the cushions, the small son who has swallowed the key and has to see a doctor, the grandmother who is in a state about the whole affair: all can benefit spiritually in the same way.

  Or take a less obvious example when it is a question not of an outward happening that indicates the operation of God’s will but of a decision to be reached. A girl wonders if she has a vocation to the religious life. She feels an attraction to the cloister, but the married life appeals to her too. Which does God will for her? Before we go any further in this, let it be said that God’s will is not going to be debarred from her if she chooses wrong, if she chooses according to self instead of according to grace. But suppose she is bent on choosing right, on choosing God’s will, whatever her own preference declares itself in the end to be. In the meantime, she prays about it and awaits a clearer indication. Now, surely in such cases of genuine doubt, the way to get light is really to want God’s will and nothing else. It is to identify one’s human will in anticipation with the eternal will of God, which, it may confidently be hoped, will emerge from the fog. So long as there exists a selfish prejudice either way, it is not in the interests of the soul to see the doubts resolved. Rather than declare His will before the soul is properly detached from self-seeking, God allows the genuine darkness to continue. Better to be in the dark about what to do next than to see what God wants and then to go in the opposite direction.

  A ball is lying motionless on a table. Tip one side of the table or the other, and the ball rolls off. If the ball is to remain still, the surface on which it rests has to remain still. If, in making decisions that have for their object the glory of God, we incline one way or another toward self, the soul is not steady enough to receive the movement of the spirit. So, in the case of uncertainty regarding vocation, the way to get light would be to mean the clause in the Our Father that chooses God’s will. God’s will in one form or another is going to be done anyway, but what the soul here is looking for is the chance of serving God’s will rather than making do with God’s will.

  One last illustration before moving on to further argument and theory: A teaching sister is told by her superior to take over a certain class. The sister dislikes the subject, dislikes the children, and dislikes the superior. But she goes ahead with it because she knows that it is the will of God for her to do so. It would be no more and no less the will of God for her if she liked the subject, liked the children, or liked the superior. But although her likes and dislikes do not affect the will of God so far as the outward act of obedience goes, they may well affect her own inward response to the will of God. It is again the question of breathing in and breathing out: the dual function of the will of God.

  There may be more merit in the distasteful than in the agreeable, but merit is not the final qualification. The love of God is the final qualification, and love is measured, as we have seen, by the degree to which we unite our wills with the will of God. At our judgment, we shall not be asked whether we enjoyed doing the will of God but whether we did it. So long as we satisfy ourselves (and God) on the basic requirement of loving His will, which means doing it, we can safely leave the question of merit to be settled in the lobby.

  “But in all these examples you have cited,” it might be objected at this point, “the eventual outcome cannot but be the will of God. Win or lose, God’s will is covered.”

  Of course. What we are trying to show here is that from our point of view, we gain far more by adapting ourselves inwardly to the call of grace and choosing God’s will although we would far rather not. We have the chance not merely of making a virtue of necessity but of perfecting the virtue, whether the necessity is there or not.

  The bride in the Canticle sought for the Beloved in the streets, but he had already passed through the streets and was found ultimately in her own soul.26 The will of God is in the marketplace, the classroom, the hospital ward, the battlefield, the car-park, the cocktail party, the stadium, but unless it is recognized in the individual human soul, it is a doctrine merely, or at best a theological fact. Rightly understood, it can become a presence. It can be to the soul a reality compared with which all outward happenings and concrete things seem woefully insubstantial.

  Ignoras te, pulcherrima — “you do not know yourself, O beautiful one.” What the Bridegroom is saying is that, unaware of the indwelling reality which is hers and which is the quality that makes her beautiful, she has no idea of what she really is. Until she has realized God’s will within her, she is not fully aware of what is going on. This is what St. Augustine means when he says, referring to the time before his conversion, “You, Lord, were within me, and I was without.” Such a realization is not simply an acquired knack, a twist of fancy. It is a habit of grace to be cultivated by response to grace. It means industry as well as insight, but once the point of perception is reached, it makes a big difference to religion, spirituality, day-to-day prayer.

  Seeing in every circumstance a pointer and a reminder, the soul becomes more or less habitually conscious of the operation of God’s will. Surrounding circumstances help the interior activity, the interior activity evaluates the surrounding circumstances. Although for the teaching nun we have talked about earlier, there was her vow of obedience to accentuate her recognition of God’s will in the work proposed, there is for everyone, vow or no vow, the same chance of recognizing God’s will in whatever has to be done. The ordinary sequence of events, unavoidable for the most part and a lot of them indifferent either way so far as the emotions go, speaks to us of God’s design, and comes to us therefore from the planning mind of God.

  Although it is true that circumstances do not shape our destiny for us, do not inevitably mold our characters, it is also true that according to what we bring to them, the circumstances of our lives can be the means of either our sanctification or rejection. What we bring to them is either recognition of God’s providence or rebellion against it. If we do not get in first and shape them, applying the doctrine of the will of God, there is always the danger that circumstances, applying the pressures of a materialistic world, may shape us.

  More than two centuries ago, a British ship was sailing far out at sea off the coast of South America. The expected rains had failed, the inhabitants of Brazil were hostile, and because the supply of drinking water on board had run out, the men were dying of thirst. Desperate in their necessity, they signaled to a passing ship (the account of the incident does not say whether it was Spanish or Portuguese) for enough fresh water to help them out until the rains came. To their dismay, the signal came back to the British seamen instructing them to lower their buckets over the side and take as much as they wanted.

  Was it a joke? The message went out again, in still more urgent terms, and the reply came back to the effect that since they were surrounded by water, the British should try using it. Eventually it was decided to let down an experimental bucket, which, when drawn up on deck, was discovered to contain not salt but fresh water. What the British did not know, but what was common knowledge to those who sailed those seas, was that the force of the Amazon was so powerful as to carry its waters miles beyond its mouth, rendering the seawater harmless.

  On all sides we are surrounded by an element that supports us; it is the element by which we are appointed to travel. It does not seem to afford us what we want. We
look elsewhere. In our thirst for the things of God, we look up at the heavens, and when no moisture comes from that quarter, we complain that the heavens have dried up. We turn to the coastline, and despair of help from there. We send out signals of distress to others who are on the same sort of voyage as we are. When we are told what to do, we think we are being made fools of. Eventually, because we have tried everything else without success, we follow our instructions and find that the solution has been there all along.

  It is significant in this connection that in the Rituale of the Church are printed official blessings for every sort of commonplace object. The implication here is that linen, bread, bells, rooms, clothes, tools and farm implements, typewriters, and handcarts can become the material means by which the soul reaches out to supernatural good. In themselves, they are just inanimate creatures to which nobody pays much attention until they are needed for a particular purpose, but in the scheme of God’s will, they are playing a part as vehicles both of the divine purpose to man and the human response to God. It is as if the Creator is bent upon so saturating His creation with Himself that creatures may assist one another in the recognition of His activity.

  If this should suggest a danger of pantheism (the heresy that identifies God with the universe), there is ample corrective in the thought that creatures, taken in the wrong way, can do .just the reverse. The truth is that while material things are far from being split-off pieces of the divine essence, as some have argued, the whole of life is so penetrated inside and out with the supernatural that wherever we turn, we cannot evade God’s will. Remember the psalmist’s rueful acknowledgment:

  Lord, You have known me sitting and standing; You have seen into my thoughts from afar. My course You have searched out, and all my ways You have foreseen . . . whither shall I go from Your spirit, whither flee from Your face? If I mount into the heavens, You are there; if I go down into the deep, You are there too. How early soever I take wing, hiding in the utter remoteness of the sea, it will be Your hand that leads me, Your hand that holds me up. I told myself that perhaps darkness would cloak me about, that night would be on my side in my pleasures. But again darkness is not dark to You; the night is as daylight to Your gaze. Wherever You look, it is the same to You . . . for to You there can be nothing hid.27