In order to reach maturity, then, it is important not to get lost in someone else’s maturity. True maturity is being oneself as a child of God. Many religious people make this mistake of taking up some saint and trying to mold themselves to the shape. But what if the shape is not the one God has designed? No two shapes are alike. All souls are made for God, but each goes by a unique way. Each has to decide whether to surrender to something less than God — and so becoming, if not a slavish imitation, a diminished person — or to surrender to the will of wisdom itself and finding identity and freedom.
Take the case of an ordinary humble man who does not know what to do with his life, who lacks confidence, who sees his contemporaries getting ahead of him, and who judges that his own lack of success must be traced to want of personality. He is no longer a boy; there is no hero to whom he can attach himself. So he follows one project after another, stirring up enthusiasm for each, but never seems to find himself in any of them. He remains, to draw from the jargon of the moment, self-consciously “unfulfilled.” Anyone can see he is unfulfilled. True, it may be in the design of God that to go through life like this in fact fulfills the divine purpose, and that our man with the missing personality is discovering a secret personality known only to God. If this is so, it can only be because the will of God has been accepted, and that in drifting from one thing to another, the misfit has deliberately fitted himself into the providential design. (And this of itself would show that personality is present in abundance.)
Normally, however, a man is meant to find his vocation and himself in the life that declares itself. The vocation to be a misfit must be a rare one. Those who are restless and dissatisfied, ever questing and wanting to better themselves, are mostly too preoccupied with themselves to think about the will of God and the vocation to follow it in full perfection. Theirs are haphazard lives with scarcely any Godward direction. Projecting themselves into one role after another, they finally project themselves into the role of failure.
There is nothing wrong with failure when it comes as a grace from God, but it is not something to be opted for and dramatized. A false identification with God’s will, whether by assuming it must always be what one wants it to be or by expecting it always to be calamitous, leads only to unreality. What is real in a man’s character, and consequently, what is real in his experience, can come to light only insofar as it is related to the truth — to reality itself as it exists in God. Without God in his life, man is submerged. He lies under an ocean of self and sin and uncertainty, always trying to see the sky but unable to because of the waters that come between. There is only one way of rising to the surface, and then the sun does the rest.
All this is not an attempt to provide a simple, cellophane-wrapped remedy for nervous, psychological, and emotional disorders. It has a more positive purpose. It is intended to encourage souls to make the supreme act of trust. It is not to claim in romantic terms that, having done so, they will then be “launched upon the grand adventure of their lives” and that from now on they will have nothing to do but observe the smooth and beautiful wisdom with which God handles their affairs; rather, it is to claim that in the blood, tears, and confusion of life, there will be something to cling onto that nothing can possibly disturb. The psalmist knows all about this when, having just complained of the darkness in himself, he prays in Psalm 14242: “Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God. Your own good spirit shall lead me into the right land; it is You who brings my soul out from trouble.”
Chapter 13
The Benefits of Accepting God’s Will
Having cautioned against expecting a panacea, we can now examine some of the consequences that should in fact follow the commitment to God’s will. The first and most noticeable result of entrusting ourselves to the good-pleasure of God must surely be a sense of security and relief. In pledging ourselves to divine wisdom, we no longer fear the outcome of our decisions, no longer doubt the value of our trials, no longer have misgivings on the score of wasted effort. We come to know beyond all question that we know nothing about our lives and that God knows all. This being so, it is with absolute confidence that we hand over the whole direction of affairs to Him.
Does this smack of fatalism, abrogation of personal responsibility, or smug detachment? No, not so long as we go on willing and so long as we go on working as though everything depended on our effort. There is a vast difference between “I needn’t bother anymore; I’ve made the supreme act” and “I’ve made the act, and to prove it, I’ll go on trying just as hard; but what happens as a result is not my business.” It is the difference between sacrificing freedom and sanctifying freedom — a distinction that may not have been appreciated in the Old Testament use of the almost synonymous words sacrifice and sanctify but which is amply accounted for in the tradition of the New.
Freed at last from laocoönizing itself in a tangle of mixed motives, the soul that has surrendered to whatever God wills can meet the serpents one by one. No matter what God asks, no matter how complicated life becomes, no matter where our inclinations lie, no matter the degree of utter exhaustion to which we have been reduced, all we need to be clear about is that God’s will is somehow coming through. This is the one thing that assumes any importance. The scale of values has now altered, and there is no longer room for — in the strict sense — disappointment. Incongruity is ruled out because an exact balance, according to this world’s estimate, is not expected. Everything, even injustice and the suffering of the innocent, is assumed to have a reason. The ordinary stumbling-blocks to faith are stumbling-blocks no more, but rather mounting-blocks.
Accordingly, the anxieties that are common to most of us tend to lessen. We now stand in the words of the Benedictus: “to serve Him without fear, in holiness and equity,”43 because those things which threaten our happiness must be powerless against a happiness that consists in willing the happiness of God.
An unhappy man is nearly always one who lives under the shadow of some dread. The present opportunity of enjoying life is darkened because he is all the time steeling himself to meet a horror in store. He is afraid he may have to go into hospital or retire from his job; he fears the death of someone he loves; he fears financial loss, atomic war, old age, death. Perhaps the fear is more subtle, and what he is afraid of is happiness or love. Or perhaps he fears the sheer continuance of his unhappiness — whether he knows the cause of it or not.
Well, all this is at least made bearable, although possibly not much more than that, when underlying it is seen to be the will of God. It is made more positively worthwhile when embraced as the will of God and offered to the greater glory of God. Even failure in marriage, failure in vocation and aspiration, failure in being able to adjust to existing conditions — all the countless failures that normally engender fears and are engendered by fears — can be resolved in the context of God’s love. “Perfect love casts out fear,”44 but even a love that is imperfect goes a long way.
Man is not required to see the end, temporarily speaking, to which his experiences are leading him. Far better that it should be hidden from him. He can guess if he likes, but he will nearly always be wrong. If, however, he makes as the end of all he experiences a realization beyond human existence, then he acts sensibly; then he acts in faith. The sort of happiness he is now envisaging “neither the rust nor the moth can consume” and it lies beyond the reach of robbers who might steal it away from him.45 Man can never entirely rid himself of fears, anxieties, and depressions because his emotions have to be taken into account, and these will go on disturbing him however well ordered the rational side of him has become.
Emotional disturbances can be the lot even of the saints. Sanctity is not proof against mind-body pressures. Instinctive reflexes, compulsions, chain-reactions: these things go on bothering people far advanced in holiness. The difference is that where holy people make allowance for them and keep them in their place, we do not. We let them get on top of us. We let them escape from the frame of God’s wi
ll and so assume new menace. It might be thought, for example, that to be habitually in a state of grace would ensure a state of contentment. “If I keep out of the occasions of sin, surely I am entitled to peace of mind.” You are not entitled to anything, and your mistake lies in equating the spiritual with the emotional.
It is true that spiritual, moral, and emotional problems react on one another. But they still remain problems after the main problem, union of the will with the will of God, has been resolved. And they remain separate. If a person of spiritual aspirations decides upon a course of moral lapses, he will experience conflict. This is obvious. But even when he has got his conduct under control again, and is willing what God wills, his emotions may well tend to run off and give him cause for anxiety and upset. Although on rational and spiritual grounds he has no call to worry, nervously and emotionally he may feel himself being torn apart. We shall have occasion to return to this point when considering the mind of Christ under pressures similar to our own.
Viewing the subject positively, from the standpoint of what help true spirituality can bring, we can judge that objectively material remedies can take on a spiritual character when accepted as the will of God. Whether a man is suffering from mental or physical ills, he can make use of the natural curative forces in full confidence that they are a means ordained by God. If God’s will traces the pattern of a man’s life, then it can be taken to have provided the natural as well as the supernatural equipment for the ordering of that life. Grace, particularly the grace that comes through the sacraments, performs its therapeutic work upon the soul. If mind and body have their appropriate therapies, the discoveries of medical science still owe their origin to God. Most of us tend to dwell too much upon the fact that God afflicts us with diseases and not enough upon the fact that He also sends remedies to relieve them. If one lot represents God’s will, so does the other.
But whatever we say about God’s will and health, our main concern here is with God’s will and happiness. Whether you call it happiness or peace of mind, you come to know the quality at a more significant level by union with its source than by anything else. Assuming that your religious objective is not the elimination of anxiety, nor even ridding yourself of temptation, you may stake your security on surrendering everything to the unqualified will of God. You lose your life in order to find it, and if you do not put your reliance upon the truth of this paradox, there is no knowing where else you can put it. Nothing carries such gilt-edge guarantees.
A further consequence of abandonment to the will of God is detachment. This is not quite the same as what we have been discussing above, peace of mind, but it arrives at the same thing in the end. Someone who is centered on God is — and to that extent — de-centered from self. People can become so fascinated by the complexities of their lives, the multiplicity of their desires, the permutations of their daydreams, that they come to miss the one thing that really matters. God’s will is the unifying factor in life, the universal denominator that brings simplicity, and when people try to bypass it, they must necessarily find themselves encumbered with every sort of complication. A holy indifference to self ’s ceaseless clamor for what is either of secondary importance or of no importance at all is one of the first signs that a soul has made everything over to God.
Those who belong to the world naturally want to accumulate as much of what the world has to offer as they can lay their hands on. Those who are dedicated to a science, an art, an ideology in such a way as to exclude interest in other fields are going to end up, unless they are careful, with an obsession. Those who make even of religion such an exclusive and intensive pursuit that they will override social and natural demands can become victims of delusion and religious mania. Unfortunately, we can make an obsession of almost anything. Almost anything. It is difficult to see how the will of God can become an obsession, but if it can, it must only be because the doctrine has been misunderstood.
Rightly understood, the doctrine detaches from obsessions, extravagances, and failures of right emphasis. Once someone has allowed himself the luxury of a mania, he has placed himself at the mercy not only of sane circumstance (which is always likely to interfere with his eccentricities) but also of attacks that his own mind has exaggerated. To entertain an obsession is, by definition, to put things in false perspective. The over-valuation of a part spells impoverishment to the whole. At first, other parts get neglected, and ultimately the whole balance is lost.
What this is leading up to is that God’s will lies in the whole of a thing just as it lies in its parts, and to give the undue emphasis of an obsessive attention to one or another of the parts is a selective act that cannot be said to conform with God’s will. It is a denial of the wholeness of God’s will. It is an expression of self and not of service. And it is doomed to disappointment.
Obsessions are doomed to disappointment for this reason: although they are chosen very often by the will, they reside mostly in the imagination. The imaginary is highly vulnerable. Whether you let yourself become obsessed by health, food, money, sleep, time, silence, speed, sex, clothes, religious observance, or any of the hundred preoccupations that draw the mind to a pinhead point of focus, you let yourself at the same time become a prey to the imaginary persecution, the imaginary neglect, the imaginary criticism, envy, ridicule, suspicion, and the rest. You no longer see things in proportion. You cannot, because you do not see them as God sees them. In order to see them as God sees them, you have to detach yourself from your obsessions and attach yourself to the will of God. Once you have attached yourself to the will of God, you see at least enough of truth to make your exaggerations look childish.
We are not talking now about the perfectly legitimate concern that a parent should feel for the morals of the young, that a religious superior should feel for the spirit and observance of the community, that a missionary should feel for the spread of the Faith. Concern of this sort goes with responsibility and is healthy. Its absence would point to lack of either feeling or zeal, or both. But because there is here no obsession, there is also no panic. When the parent, superior, or missionary finds he is being stampeded into panic, it is time for him to question himself on his attitude toward the will of God. Although serenity does not always prove the possession of the supernatural point of view — because the godless, too, can be serene — panic cannot but betray a want of trust.
Take the panic, for instance, occasioned by scruples. Scruples come from a false conscience. What happens is that the imagination fastens on some aspect of sin, and exaggerates it out of all proportion to reality. Sin comes to be seen everywhere; the soul is obsessed with it. The soul is not looking for God’s will, but for justification of its own groundless anxiety. It is looking so restlessly for relief that the will of God is not clearly seen. Since scruples are founded upon a process of reasoning that is invalid, they can be stilled only when the soul has submitted to truth. Once the human will has accepted as valid the reasoning that is imposed by obedience, in the place of that imposed by the imagination and a false conscience, the panic ceases. Why? Because the soul has accepted the will of God.
If obedience is difficult for the scrupulous person, and common sense useless to him for the time being, the virtue of trust is the way back to sanity. Trust in God’s providence and in His mercy will lead to trust in the representatives of His will. Without the exercise of this confidence, expressed in submission to another’s judgment, the trial of scruples can bring a soul to the verge of desperation. Often it is easier to bow to God’s will in a disaster such as a death than in the word of an authority. God is not tied to a particular mode of communication, and for those who are blinded either by the shock of loss or by a conflict of opinion in a matter of obedience, there is always just enough light to see what is wanted. We know what He wants. He wants our surrender.
Here is a theme if anyone wants to write a fairy-story or a ballet. The scene is a lost-property office (I believe that it is called in America a lost-and-found department) an
d the time shortly before midnight on Christmas Eve. Every sort of object is lying about, the more portable on shelves and the unwieldy in heaps and against the wall. Umbrellas, bicycles, suitcases, birdcages, parcels, hats, wheel-barrows, rocking chairs, toys, pieces of Greek statuary, baskets of decaying fruit and vegetables. As the clock over the entrance strikes twelve, the doors open and every object flies out on its way back to its owner.
To us, there is the element of mystery and fantasy because we have no idea to whom the objects belong, and we are kept guessing as to how they are finding their way home. God, looking down from heaven upon such an assortment, knows exactly to whom each object belongs, when it came into their possession, when and where it got lost, and what journey would be involved in the flight to restoration. To us, all these things are unrelated to one another; therein lies their surrealist charm. But to God, there is a pattern, and every single pair of glasses, every old deflated football, every china vase has its own special associations and its own place in the general scheme. There is nothing incongruous in a telescope lying next to a frying-pan — not more incongruous than a lion lying next to a lamb or the leopard next to the kid. There is intimate harmony between all these separate things, and God sees them unified in the unity of His will.
If the picture seems fanciful and farfetched, it at least illustrates what should happen when the human will tries to unite itself with the divine will and to see life from God’s point of view. The mind comes to see unity in diversity, comes to experience the real meaning of simplicity. You get the idea in the canticle Benedicite from the prophecy of Daniel and in the Laudate psalms. All the separate works of God’s creation — sea, mountains, rivers, animals, people, angels — come together in the single act of worship and submission to God’s will. However scattered it looks, everything in the world fits in. Everyone with his own private, personal history merges with the history of mankind, with the history of God’s providence.
Prayer and the Will of God Page 10