Prayer and the Will of God
Page 7
Indeed, if we turned more often to the psalmist for enlightenment, we would enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s will than by consulting psychiatrists and cataloging our motivations. “In the head of the book it is written of me,” he says in the thirty-ninth psalm,28 “that I should do Your will. O my God, I have desired it, and to have Your law in the midst of my heart.” Notice how this bears out what we have been considering: the inward response of the human will to the outward demand of the law — and the relation between the two constituting God’s will. Again and again in the psalms we get this idea of obedience to the design, the frame, the lines, the dispensations, the testimonies and justifications of God. God’s word is everywhere about us; we cannot escape His truth.
St. Augustine says that God’s will is our “firmament,” but even this, unless it is taken to mean the air we breathe, does not get us close enough to the reality. God’s will is a more intimate fact than the firmament of the sky, the canopy under which all our acts are performed. God’s will is the impulse of our acts, the motor power without which we could not do a thing or understand His word. It is by God’s will, to quote the psalmist again, that we are “established in His sight forever” and can say, “Blessed be the Lord from eternity to eternity. So be it.” This fiat, fiat with which the fortieth psalm closes can be taken to sum up all that has been said so far. Indeed, if we truly mean it, our fiat, fiat can stand for the whole of our religious service. Practiced in its perfection it defines sanctity itself.
Chapter 10
How the Saints Fulfill God’s Will
This is the place to examine the way in which the challenge of God’s will is met by those who must be the chief exponents of the principle. In a later chapter, we shall consider how our Lord fulfilled the Father’s will, but for the moment, our investigation takes us to those ordinary human beings like ourselves who are perfectly free to follow their own will if they want to, but who in fact have chosen to follow the will of God.
For such, the opening verses of St. Paul’s twelfth chapter to the Romans may be representative: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God, your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, the acceptable, and the perfect will of God.” The contrasting wills are shown here: the will of the world and the will of God. The soul must choose. The service of God is “reasonable” — more reasonable actually than service of the world — and if the will of God is to be proved in its fullness, there has to be an interior reformation. Forswearing conformity with the standards of the world, the truly religious soul is urged to go about the service of God in “newness of mind.” While the body is presented as a living sacrifice, the mind is presented in the same terms — as sacrificial material. There is here the same relation that we have noted before between the outward and the inward. In the adjustment of the one to the other lies the fulfillment of the perfect will of God. Man’s whole being, flesh and spirit, is the area of transformation. If one or the other, human sense or human mind, is left out, the balance is disturbed and the potential perfection is disqualified.
In case the objection is raised here that this is hardly material for beginners, it must be insisted that as a matter of fact it is. You cannot even begin unless you know what is expected of you. A saint is only a beginner who has gone deeper into the truths with which he began. There is not one law for beginners and one for experts, one spirituality for beginners and one for mystics, one will of God for beginners and another for those who are finishing. Holiness is simply the degree to which the human will is united in love to the divine, and unless we start off intending to unite our wills with God’s, we can never advance at all. It is a mistake to think of what the saint does in the way of service as something different in kind from what we do; the difference lies in the amount of love he puts into it. The will of God is for all of us the same — our sanctification. How far we achieve this end will depend upon the joint forces of God’s grace and our response. “Be you therefore perfect”29 is addressed to all.
The proposition arrived at, then, is that we undertake some sort of reformation of heart and mind in order more perfectly to serve God rather than the world. This change is known by the Greek word metanoia, and by it we judge the affairs of life in a new way.
They are the old affairs of life, but they are seen in new perspective. The deeper understanding of God’s will ensures this. In the alchemy of grace, the many facets of God’s will are no longer seen in diversity but in unity. As the beginner develops in his purpose, he sees more and more what God’s creatures represent. At the start, he could acknowledge the presence of God’s will only at intervals and in major events. He would read of a war breaking out somewhere, and would say to himself, “I suppose that must be in a curious way God’s will”; someone would die, and he would be forced to bow to God’s will. Even for that amount of recognition, there has to be a certain groundwork of metanoia, or he would accept the purely materialist assumption that these things were of terrestrial significance only and could be accounted for without reference to a divine plan.
But then, as the beginner goes to work on his metanoia, he is brought up sharply and often by what can only be evidences of God’s will. Gradually, grace working within him, the beginner looks at the world around him as a setting for the performance of God’s will. He sees history as the movement of God’s will. He sees sorrow, and even more mysteriously, he sees sin, as part of the pattern of God’s will. Where before he judged that a lot must be happening which God can scarcely have allowed for, now he can look this side of life in the face and know that nothing is going on behind God’s back. He does not have to make excuses for God: he believes in the existence of a design. He may not see how things fit in, but he knows without question that they must.
So it can be appreciated that God’s will is becoming comprehensive where hitherto it was piecemeal. It was comprehensive all along, but the beginner did not see it so. God’s will is becoming identified with God’s love. They were the same thing all along, but the beginner assigned to them respective operations. “I know what is meant by the love of God,” he had said, “because from it flow tenderness, mercy, and answers to my cry for help.” Would he have been so clear about the will of God, or would he have thought about it as something else again? Certainly if we may go by what the saints say of themselves, we see a great simplicity resulting from their labors. The testimony seems universal. Whether he happens to be apostolic or mystical, intellectual or peasant, leading churchman or obscure layman, the saint is everywhere found to be a man of one idea: God’s will.
Man comes to his knowledge by means of evidence from outside, by experience and practice. He does not learn all at once, but part at a time. This is true of a trade, of a skill, or of a science. People sometimes imagine that their understanding of a subject is immediate or congenital, that their talents express themselves perfectly by instinct. This is asking a lot, and short of an infused grace, the abilities we possess may be claimed to have developed gradually. Even in the case of the sacraments, where the grace is infused, the exercise of the appropriate virtue is a matter of progressing step by step. The facility is reached, but not automatically.
Before he can get a broken-down car into running order, a garage mechanic has to have picked up his knowledge from bits of metal. He has learned that certain combinations of bolts and screws and wires produce certain effects. Car maintenance is no longer a problem; he can drive without thinking. But it was not always so.
Or take a musician. The composer may have a gift to start with — he must have, if he is to be any good — but he learns from notes and instruments. He gets into the way of arranging isolated spots on a piece of paper so that they make up a musical score. He can finger bits of ivory, wood, metal, and strings with such sureness that the required noise results. But before this can happen, ther
e have to be observation, intake, and correlation. A translation has to take place inside if anything is to be expressed outwardly.
A better example than either of these would be the way in which a doctor comes to treat the living human body from what he has learned as a medical student from the skeleton. The study of an object composed of many separate bones kept together by wire and hanging from a hook has given him his knowledge of anatomy. The living organism gives him far more to work on in his practice, and he is picking up new knowledge every day, but as a beginner, he had to start with the bare bones, the frame.
The point is that only when the beginner has reached the stage of dealing immediately and experimentally with his material does the knowledge that he has acquired become part of him. The same is the case of the beginner with the will of God. “This is the will of God, your sanctification,”30 and without man’s will to sanctify himself, God’s will remains unfulfilled. God’s will may be halfheartedly acknowledged, intermittently obeyed, but unless it evokes the kind of response that the human will is capable of rendering — “your sanctification” being possible by God’s grace — there is something missing.
God’s will is therefore a summons. It is as though God were saying, “Give yourself to my will, and I promise to do the rest.” From recognition, through acceptance, to identification. This is the classic sequence, the perfect service.
For the will of God to come into its own as a living, vitalizing entity, not stopping short at the letter of the law, there have to be souls in the world who are dedicated to it. Such souls we call saints.
So, when you get right down to it, what would be the attitude of mind you would expect to find in a saint? Must it not be something that would express itself in some such form as this: “I pledge myself wholly to the will of God, confident that whatever my obedience to its demand involves, I shall not be left without the help to comply with it”? Self-surrender and trust: because these assume love, they assume everything else.
In the Old Testament, the verbs to sacrifice and to sanctify are used to mean almost the same thing. So, when we come to the New Testament and read our Lord’s prayer to the Father which contains the statement, “for them do I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth,”31 we know at once, even if we did not know what was to come in the Passion, that there is here the added implication of sacrifice. Our Lord is saying more than, “I am schooling myself to a high level of conduct so that my disciples may know how to behave”; he is saying, “because I have surrendered myself to Your will, they must.” What Christ wills for Himself, He wills also for His disciples. “My sacrifice, with their own sacrifices united to mine, must define the nature of Christian perfection. If they are looking for Christian holiness, they must know its conditions. If they are to be sanctified in truth, they must sacrifice their wills in truth. This is what I have willed for them because it is what You, Father, have willed for me. I can pay them no higher compliment than that.”
It can be judged from the terms of the commitment that not all who claim to be Christians would claim to go quite so far. Small blame to them. Truth is to be preferred to humbug. One has to begin somewhere. The question each individual has to ask himself is not, “Am I completely and irrevocably dedicated to the will of God at its highest and most taxing level?” because the answer, if honestly given, is pretty well bound to be discouraging, but rather, “Am I trying to let the will of God mean more to me?” If we can rise to the challenge of this second question, we are not doing too badly; we have at least made a start. There is about the attitude at least something of a dedication. Perhaps it is only the finished product in sanctity who can answer the earlier question without blinking.
To be sanctified in truth really means truth. No self-deception, no hiding behind grand talk, no vaporizing about a will of God that, when examined, turns out to be only one’s own will with a holy label. The dedication may not be the total burnt-offering that one would like it to be, but at least it must be true as far as it goes. Confessed limitations are more pleasing to God than untrue pretensions. The practical problem becomes this: how far up the scale can the human will be pushed so that it more nearly approximates God’s will for its perfection?
For an answer, we can look to the tenth chapter of Hebrews, where the process is outlined for us thus: the law is provided by God as both the frame of our human operation and an earnest of things to come; but the law does not of itself and automatically make us perfect; something else has to be added if our service is not to stop short at exact observance; mere ritual purification does no more than dispose the soul; a positive reality has to be introduced, something (or better still, someone) capable of wiping out guilt and sin and evil generally, and exercising the supremely qualifying influence for good, has to come along and the human will has somehow (which means, of course, by grace) to identify itself with that force, with that Person, with that will.
Then, by way of confirmation, the letter to the Hebrews quotes the thirty-ninth psalm. “Sacrifice and oblation You did not ask for, but a body You have given me. Holocausts for sin were not enough for You. So I cried: ‘Behold I come.’ The very first thing that is written of me in the book is that I should do Your will, O God . . . then I said: ‘Behold, I come to do Your will, O God.’ ” When Christ comes into our lives, He comes in His completeness — with His will perfectly united with the will of the Father. And when we try to come closer to Christ, we come with our wills, choosing, for all our imperfection, to unite our wills with His.
It can be readily understood what an expanding influence such an attitude must exercise. The idea is completely mistaken which makes the religious man egocentric. The truly religious man is concerned about everything except himself. Having committed himself to God in perfect trust, he does not bother to sort himself out as he used to do. He knows that he will get farther in God’s service by trust and love than by self-analysis. If there have been saints who were introspective, it is not because their pursuit of holiness made them so, but because they were introspective to begin with, and even their holiness did not cure them of it.
So when St. Augustine defined sanctity as “to live by God for the sake of God alone,” he was not narrowing the saint’s horizon but, on the contrary, widening it. God’s interests, which are wide enough to include the whole of His creation, are now the soul’s interests. God’s will, which desires the good of every single individual in the world, is reflected in the saint’s attitude of wishing well to all mankind. Nor is this just a vague, all-embracing benevolence such as a naturally friendly man would feel toward his fellows, not just a warm glow such as most of us would admit to on occasions like Christmas, but rather, it is the kind of charity that stands up to the test of personal self-sacrifice. The saint, because God did so in the person of Christ, goes out of his way to help and to save. He expects good to come out of sinful human beings, and where sin comes out instead, he is prepared to forgive. He works toward the perfect manifestation of God’s will, and where he sees rebellion against God’s will, he is not dismayed. He knows that divine love is stronger than human malice.
Indeed, one of the mistakes the would-be saint has to guard against is that of allowing himself to get too much upset by the evil in the world. He has to see sin and go on hating it, but he must learn to take its existence in his stride.
It is related of St. Francis that in the beginning of his conversion, the distress he felt at the thought of God’s love being rejected, of the innocent being corrupted, of wickedness flourishing even among those who should have been shepherding Christ’s flock, was so great as to hinder him in the work he had undertaken. He expended more energy in weeping over the frailties of man than in trying to correct them. But as he advanced in holiness, he came to a better balance in this matter, detaching himself from his over-tender feelings and making allowance for what God’s will evidently allowed for.
So it would seem that if we are to do the work of God as apostles of His will, we must
avoid getting — to use the apt American phrase — “emotionally involved.” (The English, with their quaint terminology, would murmur something about not letting the windscreen-wiper run away with one.) The true apostle is confident that God has not abandoned man, and that grace will triumph in the end. To focus all attention upon vice might lead to despair; to call for the exercise of virtue is to echo the voice of God’s will.
The apostle is a workman like any other. True, his work is full of the grace of God, but while his feet are still on the ground, he remains a realist. He can have as many ideals as he likes, the more the better, but he must go about the service of God with his sensibilities well under control. People often imagine that their love of God is outraged by the evidence of men’s sins, when really it is not their love of God that is hurt so much as their nerves. Nerves, the product of a passion, must be mortified if God’s work is to be done effectively. What would we think of a craftsman or laborer who allowed his emotions to dominate his job? Would we employ a decorator a second time who, having painted and cleaned up the house, came back a month later in floods of tears because he had heard we had messed up one of the walls? In the armed forces, which are rightly called “services,” a display of natural sentiment would be even more out of place. In the service of God, which is the highest employment of man, natural sentiment must give place to supernatural purpose. This means will.