First priority: My access and consent to God's will

-7-

The goal of the soul is complete attachment to the will of God.

One of my favorite hymns is “My Goal is God Himself.” The words are provoking and unsettling. Hymns sometimes force me to sing aloud words that I am not equal to, and this particular hymn holds my feet to the fire. A phrase such as, “At any cost, dear Lord, by any road,” causes me to leap within and also recoil a bit.

History’s great spiritual coaches often bring me to this fine line where I am warned against making my actual pursuit of spirituality more important than my knowing God. There is a distinction made between the exercise of piety and the attachment of one’s whole of life solely to the will of God, or “divine action,” as Father C calls it.

As much as I react against what I consider an American brand of spirituality, and decry its superficiality, its partial truths, its false fullness, its cheap commitments (see? I could go on and on), a true spiritual life is not made up of a reaction against something or against someone who is at enmity with God. Because I am against my culture’s injurious nurturing of an inferior quality of faith I am at that point merely anti-cultural.

As a spiritual man, I may become a social reactionary or even revolutionary, but not in order to become more spiritual. My spiritual origin and source must come first, and this is found in my access and consent to God’s will as it percolates through every moment of my life. So I am still bound to grace, as it is God’s gracious work to show me and to help me see.

The key point, really, is that I can either become someone who looks critically at my culture and complains, or I can be someone who sets his eyes on God alone and obeys.

_{“Nothing in truth is really good for me but the action which agrees with god’s design.” (Page 14)}

The words of Jesus to the Jews after his healing of the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda point out this union of wills between the Son and the Father, and the example for all future disciples to follow:

“In all truth I tell you, by himself the Son can do nothing; he can do only what he sees the Father doing; and whatever the Father does the Son does too . . . By myself I can do nothing; I can judge only as I am told to judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.” (John 5:19, 30) Also see 6:38, 8:26-29 and 12:49-50.

It must be divine action that animates me

-6-

Divine action upon the soul must take first place above all other things within and around us that would help us to respond to God. He is the designer and the maintainer of the soul.

This is what I take away from this somewhat difficult section. (And we are only on Page 11!) Father C instills a mistrust of everything that comprises the “self,” and demands that we self-empty in order that God can then work unimpeded in us and through us.

My capacity to misunderstand God is immense and should never be under-estimated. Because the spiritual life is one of impressions and suggestions and presences that are difficult to detect, one’s spirituality can simply become a mess – a psychic or psychological hodge-podge of a child’s thoughts about the adult world. One must never forget how wispy one is. How easily the merest puff of air might shift my direction or my thinking or my obeying in the slightest, unremarkable way, and yet impel me that much off course.

I must have God in my life, and I must have him in full control of all of its movements, so that his action – the divine action – is that which animates me.

Does this mean the call of the Christian is one to abject passivity? That could well be the accusation here. It is not abject passivity for a son to allow his father to instruct him, or for a student to allow a teacher to teach him, or for a coach to train him. There is a very active permission that is constantly being offered by the follower of God to allow for divine action to empower the believer to address himself to the moment in a way that is consistent with the will of God, whether it is to do, or to endure.

The importance of self-emptying is a mark of the more mystical teachings in the faith, which I, by the way, embrace. Here, Father C has taken a page from John of the Cross, who tells us to leave off everything in us that is not God in order to move further toward God. We cannot ascend the mountain if laden with the heavy materials of self-trust: “To love is to labor, to detach and strip oneself for God’s sake of all that is not God.” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, 13:6)

In fact, in his “Method for Interior Direction,” Page 440, Caussade virtually steals from the pages of the Spanish saint:

_{“The more we banish from ourselves all that is not god, the more we shall be filled with god.”}

So we are helped to make some sense of this elusive quality of the Christian life by, at the very least, this comment:

_{“Divine action … can take possession of a soul only to the extent to which that soul is emptied of all trust in its own action, for such self-confidence is a spurious fullness that excludes divine action.” (Page 12)}

This is another way to say we are to cooperate with the grace of God and not rely on our own understanding.

The Gospels certainly show us that the disciples very often expected Jesus to do something in one way, while he accomplished his will by means outside the expectations of his followers.

They expected him to destroy the city that would not believe in him. “Shall we call down fire?” They expected him to send the crowd away from him so everyone could get something to eat, but he instead fed them. They expected him to be annoyed by the presence of children, but he welcomed them. Often we see them expecting a certain course of action to be taken by Jesus, and then find him doing something different. Peter expected a fight when the Roman soldiers came to arrest Jesus. Jesus, on the other hand, healed the wounded man’s ear (Malchus), told Peter to stand down, and then went quietly with his captors.

Father C is warning us against the same wrong-headed reaction here. God has said, “My ways are higher than your ways,” (Isaiah 55:9), but we still fight with this and lobby for God to act according to our plan. If I superimpose my plans on God, I place my ideas above his. I cram his will into mine. That is, indeed, “a spurious fullness.”

The peak we ascend is not Candy Mountain

-5-

As I seek the will of God through the avenues available to me, there is a likelihood that I will merely become self-satisfied by the exercise of seeking. Go me.

There is a hint of self-congratulation in St. Peter’s remark to Jesus, asking about rewards in Matthew 19:27: “Behold, we have left everything and followed You; what then will there be for us?”

As it turns out, interestingly, Jesus simply answers the question.

Father C’s point here is that “apart from God” these avenues of spiritual growth and activity can give a person Christian ideas without touching and changing the heart or their bearing in life. What is needed is what the monastic call “the conversion of manners,” and it means that a person is in touch with God’s “life-giving power,” as Father C puts it here, such that speech and behavior and all of a person’s life is one continuous agreement with and expression of the will of God.

These avenues, apart from God, have the effect of –

_{“… emptying the heart by the very satisfaction which they give to the mind … a proud man who reads spiritual books only from curiosity and without any regard for the will of god receives only the dead letter into his mind, and his heart grows ever drier and harder.” (Page 9)}

John of the Cross called these satisfactions consolations, and said that the quest for such things is the mark of a “beginner” in the ascent of the mountain toward God. Think here in terms of preschool. Or maybe pre-preschool.

In his prologue to The Ascent of Mount Carmel, John seems to cajole those who “approach God along sweet and satisfying paths.” Egads! My own preference is for convenient and painless paths along my spiritual journey.

John of the Cross goes on to say, “The journey, then, does not consist in consolations, delights and spiritual feelings, but in the living death of the cross, sensory and spiritual, exterior and interior.”

The lack of this less easy approach around him led John to observe, “Christ is little known by those who consider themselves his friends.”

Only a few pages from now, (18) Father C will mention consolation as one of the guises by which God conceals himself in our lives.

Again I wonder if the faith hasn’t been today eviscerated by a culture that has led us only to appreciate spiritual things that make us feel good. We have now a belief in the church that simply states, “I’m in!” Nothing is said of change, obedience or transformation. And, if we do hear of such things, it is clothed in the trappings of self-help through the Christian psychologists of our day, who have apparently taken over American theological studies. (But, I digress.)

“God is good,” has been changed to “God is good for my lifestyle.”

The early Christians, when confronted by conversion, were facing the probability of a foreshortened lifespan. Of the Twelve Apostles, eleven were put to death, and only John died a natural death after having been boiled in oil and surviving, then was exiled to Patmos and later lived in Ephesus. Matthias, the “replacement” for Judas, is here considered one of the Twelve, as the death of Judas is variously recorded in the gospels. The mode of Matthias’ death is inconclusive in tradition. He was either crucified in the region of the Black Sea, or stoned and beheaded in Jerusalem, or died in Ethiopia. Paul was executed as well – beheaded in Rome.

In my world, conversion does not imply a singular focus on God and his will in every moment. God is asked to sit quietly among the crowd of all my other interests. There he is, between orchestra and juggling, behind family, near career. Sometimes you can see him. Other times the crowd makes it difficult to make him out.

Gratitude for a love I do not understand

  -4-

The heading of this section touches on an aspect of faith that my culture has stubbed out almost completely. I am not sure whether Father C himself wrote these section headings, or if it was a helpful editor. In any case, the words are alien to the world around me:

_{“Perfection does not consist in understanding God’s designs but in submitting to them.” (Page 8)}

Part of the inefficient faith that has been adopted and expressed in America is due to the loss of this particular truss in the foundation of our spiritual life. While we have been warned again and again to avoid our own understanding as a supreme guide to a walk with God – “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding,” for example, from Proverbs 3:5 – (and, “There is a way that seems good to man that leads to death,” from Proverbs 14 and again in 16) the honest Westerner will recognize that obedience on this point will place him precisely and untenably against the current.

It goes without saying that the worldly think like this. Sadly, there is not a Christian alive who is not substantially, if not completely, influenced by the singular importance of “my own understanding.”

That is to say, I will believe of God only what I understand of God. I will believe of the faith only what I understand of the faith. Worse still, I will obey only orders that I completely understand.

We would be appalled if one of our own took up a defenseless position, such as building an ark, healing the sick, tending to a leper colony or choosing death over a simple verbal denial of Christ. We would warn such a person that they had not thought it through.

Some acts of charity are indefensible. When Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, volunteered to be starved to death at Auschwitz in July 1941, in place of a man he hardly knew, we could say this selfless act made no sense. The man he saved that day could have been killed in the death camp the next day, or later the same day. The man he saved may have been a cheat, or a thief, or could become one later. All Kolbe knew was that the man had called out in horror that he would never see his wife and children again. Kolbe asked to take the man’s place. The prison guard agreed, and Kolbe was starved for 14 days, caring for the other men with him who were condemned in this way, and eventually given a lethal injection in August.

Every day since then, until his own death 53 years later, Francizek Gajownicek was thankful to Kolbe (now St. Maximilian since 1994) for “the gift of life.” In 1994, at the St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church of Houston, Gajownicek told his translator Chaplain Thaddeus Horbowy that “so long as he ... has breath in his lungs, he would consider it his duty to tell people about the heroic act of love by Maximilian Kolbe.” Gajownicek died on March 13, 1995, a gentle old soul that had been touched by Christ-like love against the ugly backdrop of unutterable cruelty.

Here are some comments from the man senselessly saved: “I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

“I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

“For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.”

Faith, hope and love sometimes lead us to do things beyond our own understanding, much less the understanding of on-lookers. Believing only what we understand will stop us cold. My culture replaces faith, hope and love with discussion and adequate debate. Our communities of faith do this as well, sometimes.

I wish to take a page from Francizek’s book, and spend my life in gratitude for a love I have yet to understand. To do this I have to turn my back on my culture and the poor quality of faith that it has nurtured. To face Christ one must countenance none else; nothing other.

God provides a holiness that is possible

 -3-

Early in this study of holiness we are told something that may not be easily believed. Namely, that holiness is attainable.

If we are going to look at a book titled “self-abandonment,” it would be rather false to maintain somewhere in the book that this act of cooperation with the grace of God is not really possible. If we are honest, we can admit that words such as “holy” and “sanctified” have left us somewhat fenced out from the real interior of the faith. We are called to think and act in new, radical ways that are to be known by us and seen by others as expressions of holiness, and yet, we are reminded that these things can’t happen and not to worry about it too much since we are, after all, forgiven. In the name of justification, sanctification is not invited to the potluck.

Father C puts it very well when he says sanctity is:

_{“… the treasure which we never find because we imagine it to be too far away to be sought.” (Page 7)}

It is disarming to hear our guide talk about holiness as “easy,” “reasonable,” and “simple.” I am mostly accustomed to words more related to “impossible,” “only in glory,” and “everybody falling short.” Holiness doesn’t have a chance in such soil, you know, “down here.”

Ultimately, I think we are defensive when it comes to matters of holiness. When Scripture addresses our need to walk in a manner worthy of our calling, to live in the light as He is in the light, to be holy as God is holy, rather than step up to these words, we tend to run inside the little theological fort we have built out of forgiveness, justification and sonship.

Perhaps it is easier to be forgiven than to be holy.

This, to Father C, is odd behavior, because who is more prepared for holy living than the justified, the forgiven children of God? Thus, holiness is not a remote theological concept, but an immediate, personal, graspable response on our part. We are to fortify our lives with holiness, rather than against it.

It is not so complicated that only the saintly or the knowledgeable can “get it.” In sum, he boils down sanctity to these two aspects – to do and to endure.

Hard as it is, we have to come to grips with works. The faithful have long been suspect of works, because works do not save us. That tends to end all discussion. But works have a great deal to do with our salvation and our sanctity. I am not myself sure what the condition of the soul would be of a workless believer. The very idea of cooperating with the grace of God is offensive to some, but these same brothers contend that some sort of evident transformation ought to be a part of the Christian experience. So worried are we that we might be acting well in the name of God for the wrong reason that we have let ourselves believe we should hang back and let God’s mercy make up the difference for our inactivity and shoddy behavior. We have developed plenty of reasons to remain the faithful inert.

 _{“The active practice of fidelity consists in accomplishing the duties imposed on us by the general laws of God and the Church, and by the particular state of life which we have embraced. Passive fidelity consists in the loving acceptance of all that God sends us at every moment.” (Page 5)}

He will add, in a few pages:

_{“… when the divine plan prescribes action, holiness for us lies in activity.” (page 15)}

My friends, hang onto that one!

What he says about active fidelity as “accomplishing duties” is fairly clear, but what he writes about passive fidelity sounds new and needful:

_{“It consists merely in accepting what most frequently cannot be avoided, and in suffering with love, that is to say with resignation and sweetness what is too often endured with weariness and discontent.” (Page 7)}

God's leading is always toward life with Him

-2-

Mary did not know the design of God before He sent word to her; nor did she know the full story of what this Son of hers would do and what demands would be further made of her.

How easy it is to demand more information, or more time to research consequences before we will acquiesce to what we consider to be the will of God. I am not as at ease in trusting God as Mary was. My sophistication gets the better of me, and will want to know what is being required of me before I sign my name to a fiat. This is a spirit of uncertainty that I had hoped to be done with by now, but I see I am still reserved and non-committal when faced with a too jarring spiritual movement against the routines of my days.

You can be sure Mary had other plans. Or, let’s just say she didn’t always consider that she would one day give birth to the Messiah. So, the announcement to her that she had been identified and chosen for this role of honor and singular importance certainly changed her idea of what she thought she might do with her life.

If God were to announce some peculiar designation to me, I am afraid I am too horribly jaded by the world and even the quality of the Christianity in my culture to be immediately and completely open to a new direction, an unfamiliar role, an unanticipated adjustment. To some extent, this means I am dragging my feet with regard to transformation.

Not that I don’t want transformation! I just don’t want it to be painful or inconvenient. My martyred brothers and sisters who have gone centuries before me must think I am an idiot.

Jesus tells Nicodemus (John 3) that those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind, which blows where it will, and no one knows where it comes from or where it is going. This is as if to say an attachment to Jesus is going to involve a significant disengagement from the things that were formerly considered substantial. This will involve a willingness to let go of answers upon which we are accustomed to insist.

For example, “Where are we going?” Abram, when he left Ur in obedience to God, was told by God that he was going “to a place I will show you.” That’s pretty unspecific. Abram’s call was to life, and the fulfillment of this life was brought through his obedience to God – his close contact with God.

Jesus is updating Nicodemus. The belief to which Jesus calls Nicodemus contains the same vague notion of “a place I will show you” by this mention of wind, but includes the same promise of life. Only now life is more fully described than ever before.

Mary and Abram must have recognized that the call of God upon them was not one of duty, but of life. God will never tell us he has work for us without telling us that he primarily and superlatively has life for us. Possibly this “take” on his will for me will make me less resistant to it.

Book I, Chapter One -- God's Use of Moments

He begins with a curious comparison to olden times, and says, like we always do, that his contemporary times had become lax and superficial in the spiritual well-being department. I wonder what he would say today!

What he says is that the people of the Gospel events were “more upright and simple.”

_{“Then it was enough for those who led a spiritual life to see that each moment brought with it a duty to be faithfully fulfilled.” (Page 3)}

It was natural for them to unfold time and live thoroughly through each moment with the idea that God was peering at them through it, and had personally delivered this moment as a gift and with an expectation that they who possessed this moment were to respond to it and move through it uprightly.

_{“Under God’s unceasing guidance their spirit turned without conscious effort to each new duty as it was presented to them by God each hour of the day.” (Page 3)}

No doubt my contemporary day has lost this. We speak highly of spirituality, but the good father’s first page already sounds like it was written on another planet in an alien tongue.

For my part, I was never taught to receive each moment and journey through it purposefully. Horace’s carpe diem told me to make every moment count, but it did not tell me that every moment intrinsically counts, whether or not I am particularly involved. I could be out seizing the day and entirely missing the point.

God is using moments to communicate to me what is important … what He is doing … where He is acting. I am not using moments to hear this. I have my own agenda; my own definition of spirituality; my own ideas about who God is and what He is doing. I will only hear in these moments the parts that fit my script.

So much self has grown over the image of God and the redemptive presence of the Holy Spirit, that God’s voice, God’s ideas, God’s work, God’s very presence, is indistinct. I hear my stuff rattling around in my inner life and piously tell my friends God is hard at it within me, speaking, working, responding. What He is probably doing is suffocating under the dense overgrowth of self that provides him neither air in nor light out.

Father Jean-Pierre is right. We aren’t much good at this, and much is needed to help us regain this lost inner ground.

Whatever happened to, “Whatever You say, Lord”?

Without effort he moves nextly to the “utter self-abandonment” of Mary when confronted with the design of God to bring forth the Incarnate Son into the world – Mary’s fiat.

_{“Be it done unto me according to your word” contains “all the mystical theology of our ancestors,” he says. (Page 3)}

This was Mary’s acceptance of God’s will “under whatever form it was manifested.” She was obviously prepared inwardly to take on such an abandonment. Her orders had changed, and the words of the angel would change everything about her. Is she ready for this?

Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.