An inefficient knowledge of God yields an inefficient spiritual life

 

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 5-

A.W. Tozer, begins in his book, Knowledge of the Holy, by making this crucial point: What we believe about God will influence every other aspect of our spiritual life. More to the point, the Psalms point out that Man becomes like that which he worships:

“They who make idols are like them; so are all who trust in and lean on them.” (Psalm 115:4)

Because it is humanly impossible to see, hear and pay attention to everything that God is doing, saying and thinking, and because what little we can comprehend does not occupy us very much, it seems that we project our limitedness onto God. We are prone to believe that God is only the sum total of all that we believe about him. We tend to see him as creaky, stiff, slow to act and unwilling to speak – maybe even grumpy or bored.

Good heavens! That’s not him! That’s me!

But because we can’t perceive all his movements in our moments we perilously conclude that he is not as active, is not as involved, not as interested, and has stood off for some reason. The psalmist – always honest to his frailty – sometimes feels this way; asking God where he is, or how long he will stand aside (e.g. Psalm 6:3, 13:1, 35:17). We impose this perceived remoteness upon our theology and it sullies our view of God and our willingness to pray.

This is why it is so important to align our beliefs with truth. Anything that affects our view of God and our willingness to pray affects the very core of our spiritual bearing. We must be careful NOT to let these sleeping misgivings lie.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the parable of the persistent friend (11:5-8). At first glance Jesus seems to be characterizing God as a man who cannot be inconvenienced late at night to give his friend some loaves in order to provide for the friend’s surprise guests. This presentation is a little difficult.

Do we indeed have to pry goodness from God? Is it not in the very nature of God to express and lavish goodness upon the beloved?

Jesus immediately speaks to this story by saying, “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” (Luke 11:9)

Jesus further goes on to evoke the image of a father giving a fish or an egg to his son who asks, and says, “how much more will the heavenly Father give” to his sons what they need – namely, the Holy Spirit (v. 10-13).

Although Christ’s story about the man in bed at night seems to say the opposite (he has said his parables would blind those who hear without faith), the thrust of the story is that God is indeed the one who is always divinely acting. If we misunderstand this and think that God is somehow inconvenienced by our asking, we are not to allow this misperception to become a tenet of our faith. Rather, pray on … ask away always with the expectation of receiving, search always with the hope of finding, knock always with the assurance that somehow the solid door will be pulled open.

These words are a continuation of the picture of the friend seeking loaves from his friend in bed late at night, so we can know that Jesus did not in fact say one thing and then the opposite. The searching, knocking and asking was all done by the parable’s friend in need. Far from giving credence to our frail belief and mistrust in God’s interest in us, Jesus proposes that we press on shamelessly. God’s plenty is there, but only faith will open the door.

In fact, the word Luke used for “persistent” in the story literally does mean “shameless,” which even further colors the extent to which God will welcome and honor those who ask, seek and knock to gain what they need from his willing, gracious hand.

We are free to persist because God is willing to bestow what is good to his people. Love is like that.

God’s continuous work in his disciples is the work of the Holy Spirit. Caussade is going to speak of this in two ways: First, that the risen Christ continues to live his goodness and life through the stream of his followers, and, second, that the Holy Spirit produces a kind of living gospel in each of us as we walk moment by moment in the life of God.

While both of these ideas can be horribly and wickedly twisted to mean some very unchristian things, they are put forth and advocated with no threat to Christian thought, and no wandering into heretical teachings or fields devoid of any trace of orthodox Christian theology.

The idea that Christ lives in us, and that the life we live is an extension of his life in ours through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit has been believed since Jesus first mentioned that he would send “another Helper” (John 14:15-17) to ignite the soul of each member of his flock. In this passage, Jesus goes so far as to say the Spirit “abides with you and will be in you.”

The Apostle Paul stated this indwelling in several ways, always with the emphasis that his (or the believer’s) life belongs to Jesus:

“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

“If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.” (Romans 8:10-11)

“…so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith …” (Ephesians 3:17)

“… to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)

“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (I Corinthians 6:19)

In these passages simply take note of the location of Christ or the Holy Spirit. He is “in me,” “in your hearts,” “in you,” and he “dwells in you.”

All of this is another way of saying that Christ continues his work through his people. Christ told the Twelve that they would do more numerous works than he had done (John 14:12). The plan in the heart of God was always to multiply the works of the Son of God through the believing followers, and to do this through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit within them.

This continuation of the work of Christ through us, then, involves continual divine action on the part of God. Since our guide makes the significant point that “all the aeons of time are, properly speaking, but the history of the divine action,” (Page 27), then, in as much as we are bound to Christ, we are part of that history.

Caussade is suggesting that if such a history could exist in the form of a book, it would enumerate all divine action through each and every believer over the course of all time. He calls this book, beautifully, the “gospel of the Holy Spirit.”

As it is, pages and pages are being written upon us as a living gospel, with the Spirit as the author:

_{“While [the Holy spirit] assists the church in the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, he writes his own gospel, and he writes it in the hearts of the faithful. All the actions, all the moments of the saints make up the gospel of the holy spirit.” (Page 27)}

Returning to the initial thought in the this section then, God is not only acting in our lives, he is doing more than we can see, and much more than we can imagine. The Gospel of the Holy Spirit grows by pages every day, recording in our hearts the known and unknown divine perfections bestowed upon us or through us:

“ … for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)

The spiritual discipline of paying attention

  Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 4-

Two books are called to our attention here. The first is the paper-and-ink word of God. The second is the “book” that God produces through our experience of him – the personal diary of oneself and God.

It is needful to pause here for a moment and consider how difficult it is to put into writing some of the deeper, more prayerful expressions of the faith. Those of a more contemplative nature have said that union with God through contemplation is rare, momentary, cannot be caused by the seeker, and cannot be prolonged by the one so engaged with the presence of God. It is also considered an inexpressible, wordless experience in which one simply basks in the company of God.

I believe we can count Father Caussade among those who have taken much to heart from the likes of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avilla, co-founders of the Discalced Carmelite order, and both considered “mystical” in their published works about God. (As we go along, I will touch on an unfortunate attitude among some believers that “mystical” equals “dismissible.”)

For example, Father C mentions a “ray of darkness,” in this section, which is lifted from the pages of John of the Cross. (See Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter 5, Section 3, where John says he got the phrase from St. Dionysius and “other mystical theologians.”) The idea of faith being sightless, in the sense of walking not by the light of day, weighs heavily in some of John’s thoughts about ascending the mount, or treading in the soul’s dark night. (In Scripture, see: “For we walk by faith not by sight.” 2 Corinthians 5:7, for example.) Obviously, the language begins to fail us in expressing all there is to express about God. We know God to be infinite, and so we must realize that we will soon run out of vocabulary to describe him and our walk with him.

In comments about John of the Cross in The Impact of God, Iain Matthew points out the saint’s search for these nearly wordless descriptions of God, and says John found some help in the Psalms and in Revelation. These, says Matthew, “tell us ‘something.’ They all frame it well, but [John] says, ‘None of them explains it, nor all of them together.’” (Page 94, quoting the second redaction of John of the Cross’s Spiritual Canticle [38.8].)

I have to point out that John of the Cross had a deep, abiding love for God. His love for God transcended the Scriptures in the same way that a young man’s love for his fiancée transcends her letters to him. Indeed, it is not the letters he loves, but the person who wrote them.

Along this line of reasoning also, William Barclay comments on the Gospel of John at one point saying, significantly, “The Jews worshipped a God who wrote rather than a God who acted and therefore when Christ came they did not recognize him. The function of the Scriptures is not to give life, but to point to him who can.” (The Gospel of John, Volume 1, Page 198)

We are advised that Christ is a person, rather than a book. There is no dismissing the Bible by John, Jean-Pierre or myself. The Bible opens us to a relationship with God, tells us who God is, and what he has done for us in Christ, but a relationship with the Bible as a student/scholar for information is not the same as a relationship with Christ as a disciple for transformation.

It should come as no surprise that we are not always able to capture God in our words. Consider that many of the hearers of Jesus (and here I mean believers, not just detractors) spent much of their time saying, “Huh?” and seeking out Jesus for clarification.

What did that parable mean? How can I be born again from my mother’s womb? Where is this living water of which you speak? How can he rebuild the temple in three days when it took years to build? Where are you going that we may not follow? These are but a few of the questions found in the gospel accounts.

Sometimes bringing words to bear on one’s experience with God will prove difficult. Paul mentions such a thing in Second  Corinthians, where he mentions “a man known to me” that was caught up into the “third heaven” and there found himself in a situation where whatever happened was unutterable, inexpressible. The likelihood here is that Paul is talking about himself, and the reference is thought to be to his vision of Jesus and corresponding conversion on the road to Damascus (from Acts 9). Obviously, some dimension of this experience was describable. Other aspects of this event, which eternally altered him, were beyond words.

On a much smaller scale, we realize words sometimes fail us when we wish we could say more than “thank you” to someone who has touched us deeply or saved our lives or rescued our child. “Thank you” doesn’t begin to say what every fiber in one’s being wants to express.

The passage in Second Corinthians is not easily understood, and sometimes John, Teresa, Jean-Pierre and others write passages that are difficult. If the visions of Ezekiel and John the Apostle confront the reader with complex imagery, then we must expect anyone else who writes of their visions or their deepest experiences in prayer and contemplation to struggle to put these into words and thus challenge the reader to understand them.

From this vantage point it might now be easier for us to come to Father C’s description of the two books – one the Scriptures, and one the experiences of the seeker and follower of Christ.

Taking his cue from the biblical concept that faith is a kind of sight or way of seeing that transcends or operates beyond the sense of sight, our guide assures us that God has not ceased working or speaking on the occasions in which we cannot see or hear him. God continues to act through events and occurrences – both historically and personally.

We know from Hebrews 11:1 that faith is “the assurance of things not seen.” Or, as the New Jerusalem Bible renders it, “Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen.”

Father C also knows that anything that happens that we do not understand or in which we cannot perceive God’s hand, we will likely discard. We are reminded here that nothing happens beyond God’s grasp, and nothing can lie too far afield to be outside of the providence of God. In learning to see in this way, we have to suspend our tendency to dismiss that which we cannot very well see or hear or even understand clearly.

When many of Christ’s followers departed from him in John 6, their conversation may have been something like this: “I don’t understand what he means. I am leaving.” Whereas, the Apostles put it this way: “I don’t understand what he means. I am staying.”

Since we cannot see these divine mysteries with the naked eye, we are told we have to operate in the dark – simply unaided by the eye. We have to learn to see with faith apart from natural light. We tend to associate darkness with the presence of evil or the absence of God, but in the sense that it used here by Caussade and Company, darkness is the mode in which faith operates when unaided by the light of day. Hence the strange expression, “a ray of darkness.”

He will expound on this in later sections, but, for now, we are to understand that we do not spend enough time seeking and finding God by faith in the events that occur around us.

In other words, God is interacting with you and with the world moment by moment. Are you in tune with this? Do you bother to look? Do you trouble yourself to believe that God’s providence, his “infinite perfections,” are making their way through every nook and cranny of the world and of your own life? Do you use faith to see?

If you do not, you are something of a Deist; living under the false assumption that God acted through Christ, dropped off the Bible (canonized some 300 years after Jesus died) and now sits inertly in an old rocking chair in heaven waiting for the angels to open the vials.

This comprises belief in a silent God. The Scriptures and the Church do not hold forth such a notion. God is hidden, but not absent. He is hard to hear, but he is not silent. God speaks through events, but must be perceived through faith. He works “in realities that are unseen.”

And so, the good father simply demands here that we pay more attention:

_{“But what god says to you, dear souls, the words he pronounces from moment to moment, the substance of which is not paper and ink but what you suffer and what you have to do from moment to moment, does this deserve no attention from you?.” (Page 26)}

'You may rely on it . . . Reply hazy . . . Ask again later . . .'

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 3-

Whenever we study the topic of the will of God, it seems our material for thought usually veers in the direction of knowing what we are supposed to do. That is, it is quite common for believers to think in terms of, “What does God want me to do in this situation?” Shall I speak to a friend about his bad attitude? Do I apply for this job instead of that one? Should I move? Should I stay? How should I respond? What church shall I attend? How involved should I become?

These are questions of significance to us, and we can be glad that God is there to help us decide such things.

However, if we think of the will of God as merely a means to make good decisions in our lives, then we have severely limited our relationship with him, and we are far, far away from the Christian understanding of the will of God. What we have in God, at this meager point, is God as a Magic 8-Ball.

In the will of God, we have everything that God offers us completely available at every moment. Wherever he is, his everything is presently offered. This is his will, to press everything he is into our moments. I believe we touch on this very little in the course of our lives. For some reason it is hard to remember and difficult to integrate.

We do not frequently say in our hearts, “It is the Lord.” Our circumstances send us dropping to our knees, not so much to recognize God as king at this moment, but to once again shake the Magic 8-ball.

God has availed himself to us as infinitely much more rich and personal and wonderful and beautiful than a 20-answer liquid dice agitator. While we are quite small in comparison to our Creator Father, we are made broad enough within to contain the everything that He presently offers us.

Speaking to us as the Lord, the good father dares us to “dilate” our hearts. Wonderful word.

 _{“What do you desire, holy souls? Do not hold back, carry your longings beyond all measures and limits, dilate your hearts to an infinite extent, I have enough to fill them.” (Page 23)}

Indeed, it is God’s desire to take care of us and overwhelm us with his goodness. The Scriptures bear this out in many places – suggesting we are free to dilate as much as we like:

“I, Yahweh, am your God, who brought you here from Egypt, you have only to open your mouth for me to fill it. (Psalm 81:10)

“Glory be to him whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” (Ephesians 3:20)

“I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)

I don’t know why we hesitate or feel a need to set up qualifiers and limits to the extent of the riches we have in God. Are we afraid to tell ourselves we have God’s everything because conditions in and around us are not perfect? Is it because we allow circumstances to blur our understanding of God’s everything, and we for some reason believe he is holding out on us? Is it because we have only one definition of prosperity and God does not always prosper us according to our definition?

Our reluctance here suggests that we will not be able to dilate our hearts much. We haven’t the faith to do so. In fact, we trust God only so much. “In God we trust … kinda,” should perhaps be stamped on American coins.

The good father says as much when he informs us that God’s presence in the moment is realized according to one’s (gulp) measure of faith:

_{“Faith is the measure; what you find in the present moment will be according to the measure of your faith.” (Page 23)}

Here it would seem a good idea to ask God to increase the measure of our faith – to pray that he would help us to better see, better believe, better imagine and better trust in him. Once in the company of God, why would the heart go elsewhere unless it failed to see, believe, imagine and trust?

Faith is a radically different way of seeing

-2-

The point of view of the believer is essentially and radically different from that of the non-believer. This is no mere difference of opinion. We Christians see all of life from the vantage point afforded us by faith. To those who have chosen to see life and the world without faith, the believer might seem ridiculous.

During the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, an American news team caught up with some Christian Haitians, quake victims, who were singing praises to God in the street. The newscaster seemed alarmed and confused. “Why would they do such a thing?” was the question behind the head-shaking and the knitted brow.

St. Paul warns the Corinthians that the world’s wise words “would make the cross of Christ pointless. The message of the cross is folly to those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God.” (First Corinthians 1:17-18)

We would do well to remember how fiercely God pits himself against the thinking of the age. The one is ruin, the other is resurrection. The one is the cross of Christ as pointless; the other is the His cross as the power of God.

Our guide refers to the believer’s point of view “the soul illumined by faith.” In every moment, he has told us, is the King present in disguise. In faith we see him beneath the trappings of what is otherwise deemed ordinary:

_{“He who knows that a certain person in disguise is the king welcomes him in a very different manner from one who seeing the exterior aspect of an ordinary man treats him according to his appearance … yet, the heart nonetheless reveres the royal majesty beneath the mean trappings.’” (Page 20-21)}

God appears to us cloaked in the commonplace. He speaks to us in the quiet of suffering. He whispers his presence to us in our lonely, sickly, distressed, weary, dreary hours. When our imagination is numb and our life drifts into windless seas and a remote malaise sets into our heart, God is present in a way that only faith can recognize. In all of these, God honors us by humbling himself to be with us through these “mean trappings” in such a way that we can turn from anything at any moment and say, “It is the King.”

We are told in several places in Scripture to “rejoice” or to “count it all joy,” when we are afflicted by what are either called trials or persecutions. (Matthew 5:12, James 1, Romans 5, First Peter 3, for example.) Paul is clear enough in Romans 12:12 – “Be joyful in hope; persevere in hardship; keep praying regularly.” For “persevere in hardship,” the Amplified Bible has, “be steadfast and patient in suffering and tribulation.”

Every believer will be confronted with difficulties, and will have to decide whether and how to integrate these experiences into his life of faith, or how to somehow detach suffering from faith. While the former is difficult, the latter is impossible. Faith does not equal suffering, but faith is all encompassing and does not overlook or dismiss suffering. Faith integrates suffering, duty and consolation. If it does not, it is not fully formed in us, and we yet have need for God to expand in us the sense of his presence in every moment of our lives.

He will not leave us fragmented.

It is his work in our lives that enables us to say, “It is the King,” and to recognize him in his many disguises.

Take up your cross and follow Me ... to Starbuck's?!?

Book 1, Chapter 2

-1-

_{“There is no moment at which god does not present himself under the guise of some suffering, some consolation or some duty.” (Page 18)}

It is essential that the believer understand the constant attention of God under which he lives. One of the most persistent images of God and his relationship to his people is that of the good shepherd keeping watch over his flock. (See John 10, Psalm 95, Matthew 9, Luke 15, John 21, for example.)

The shepherds of Palestine knew their animals sometimes for years, as the sheep from these areas were kept for their wool rather than their meat. The shepherds were the flock’s protectors, guides, feeders and shelterers. If the shepherd was away, the flock was in peril. There was never a moment when a sheep was safely independent from the care of the shepherd.

It must be the Christian’s understanding that God is constantly, compassionately present. Only then can we recognize the will of God in the trials that we endure. Joseph saw through the many insulting events in his life – the jealousy and poor treatment of his brothers, his being sold into slavery, the false accusation from Potiphar’s wife that landed him in prison for years – as the hand of God in disguise.

“As for you, you meant evil against me,” he told his brothers, “but God meant it for good.” Genesis 50:20

It is extremely difficult to say this out loud about life, and mean it.

To come to this understanding, Joseph had to realize that God had been faithfully present to him disguised as adversity. “But Yahweh was with Joseph,” the Bible says of Joseph’s time in jail. “He showed him faithful love and made him popular with the chief gaoler” (Genesis 39:21). Only through faith can one know, intuitively, that God is at work in ways that are not obvious. In Father C’s words, these disguises of the Lord come in the form of consolation, duty or suffering.

I only like one of the above: Consolation. The other two, duty and suffering, are not only hardships, but current Christian culture has all but insisted that God is definitely not present in them. Even if it is not spoken aloud, it is a common tenet that, if God is good, and I know God, then my life should be good. “Good” here is taken to mean comfortable, easy, prosperous, and disease-free with little or no tension.

During the last half of the 20^th Century, North American Christianity has come to equate faith in God with self-help. Our faith is standing in the same line as oxygen bars, health clubs, ionized air, therapeutic massage, aroma therapy and tap water purifiers. Prosperity is promised to the righteous, and suffering to those lacking faith. Trendy American theology would have us take up our cross daily and follow Jesus into a Starbuck’s.

Thus, it has become very difficult to convince the believing community that God addresses himself to us through suffering. We might believe suffering produces patience and steadfastness (from James 1, and Romans 5), but I suspect that we have looked upon this as we would maggots cleansing a wound. It is far more difficult, and far more foreign to us to find God present and speaking to us in our affliction. We are more apt to believe that we are suffering because we are not in God’s will, rather than the fact that hardship will sometimes come our way when we are smack dab in the middle of it.

Also, we do not readily associate the responsibilities of our ordinary life as being very spiritual. “Duty,” says Father C, is one of the disguises that God uses to express his will in our lives. One’s job, or chores, and all the responsibilities that come with family life and generally being a person on the planet are the things that make up duty.

It is possible for the believer to see all of these things as being remarkably unreligious, and therefore of no value in the scheme of things when it comes to the inner life and the walk with God. These secular aspects make up a great deal of life for most of us. Even among the Cistercian monks at Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah, their day is made up of cleaning, cooking, dusting, mending, laundry, maintenance, office work, accounting, plus what work they can do associated with their property.

Living under St. Benedict’s Rule, the monk’s day is made up of three general thrusts: Work, Study and Prayer. For “work,” read “duty.” It is also an emphasis in monastic living that each of these things is sacred of itself. The division between the sacred and the secular, which most of us have been told by our culture is a valid separation, does not exist in the mind of the monk, nor really does it exist in the mind of a believer who has caught this notion of the sacred ordinary – the reality that God is involved in our lives in every moment, and not just the expressly religious or the ecstatic ones.

_{“All that occurs within us, around us and by our means covers and hides his divine action … at every occurance we should say dominus est. ‘it is the lord.’” (Page 18, 19) (See john 21:7)}

We must have much more than a point of view about God

-9-

_{“The heart alone makes the difference.” (Page 18)}

As in the singular case of the two thieves on crosses beside Jesus, two men may be experiencing the same conditions, the same sufferings, the same occurrences, and yet for one this is a means to sanctity and to another it is ruin.

It would be a mistake, I think, to simply say that one’s point of view makes all the difference. We are called to have much more than a mere “point of view” about God. If anything, the points of view that all of us have about God are part of the “spurious fullness” that marks the spiritual superficiality upon which we gorge ourselves with gusto.

Of the many calls from Jesus to gather in a believing people – “pick up your cross daily and follow Me,” “you who are weary and heavy-laden, come for rest,” “you who are thirsty, here is water,” for example – at no time did he talk about merely changing one’s point of view. Certainly, it changed, but it did so when people responded in belief, committedly, to God.

My generation loves the idea of God. This places us in the ranks of the group John of the Cross referred to: “Christ is little known by those who consider themselves his friends.”

Knowing how quickly we might dissemble his comment, Father C immediately clarifies:

 _{“by the heart is meant the will, and sanctity therefore consists in willing what happens to us by god’s design. yes, holiness of heart is a simple fiat, a simple conformity of the will to god’s will.” (Page 18)}

God's will is never far away

-8-

Whenever the believer comes to a crossroads of “not my will, but Thine be done,” (and Father C insists that this is a moment-by-moment experience for those who know God), it is fair to ask what God’s will might be, and where and how it might be found.

Our guide here depends very much on what he calls the duties that flow from one’s “state of life.”

His immediate audience, the sisters of Nancy, would have had a very structured state of life unfolding from their vows, their responsibilities and commitments within their community, and the convent’s role in the greater surrounding community that it served.

Father C refuses to allow us to think that this cloistered, rigorously pious atmosphere is the only means to sanctity. Rather, he says, each of us will have a state of life that is quite different from that of others, and it will provide its own unique opportunities to discover the divine will and to align ourselves with divine action.

My commitments and responsibilities are going to be quite different from any of the nuns of Nancy, and different from the fellow worshipers around me at Mass. My state of life and its particular demands upon me (the “duties”) are exclusively mine. Through these, the will of God will show itself. My ultimate responsibility is to submit to the divine will that presses itself into the moment and expresses itself to me through my life as it is.

Obviously, where God is, his will is also. If God is present to me in every moment, then the divine will is there to leave its impress as well. We tend to make the topic of God’s will so mysterious that we could never tell whether or not we are aligned with it.

From within one’s state of life will emerge the means to sanctity through one’s attachment to God’s design. These means include the duties that flow from being a child to parents, an employee to a boss, a member of one’s community, a neighbor to those nearby, a friend to friends, and a servant to Christ.

My duties are as unique to me as is my situation. It is extremely important to keep this in mind, lest we impose our route to holiness on another, or allow someone else to abuse their role as brother or leader by exacting from us a means that is from their state of life, but not necessarily one that coincides with our own. Since our pursuit of God and his will is something that can be far from concrete, there is something quite satisfying about imposing demands upon others, or taking orders from someone who seems either to be more spiritual or merely more forceful than we are.

When I was in college, some of my friends and I took offense at some of the ministries around us that seemed to want to make all of us the same. We called it “cookie-cutter Christianity.” We may have been young anarchists in our own way, but we were cutting our teeth as disciples in a way that would balance a healthy view of conformity with a respect for the individual’s pace and style and, well, state of life.

We may call our state of life the ordinary routines that make their demands upon us. For example, a young parent does not need to think very hard or pray for long hours to decide whether it is God’s will that their infant child be fed or kept warm. Any young parent would respond here, but the Christian parent has the quiet assurance that he or she is aligned with the will of God in this matter. The non-believer has no need to see it this way.

Much of ordinary life passes us by without a true acknowledgment that the will of God is attached to it. We are bound to think, really, that it is the will of God when I pray or read the Bible, but his will does not speak to my doing the laundry, my feeding the cats or my piano lessons.

If we cannot acknowledge God’s divine plan in our ordinary, routine hours, we in effect absent him from us. We will live as though God is involved sometimes, and sometimes not. You can see how this will lead to a fragmented and inconsistent view of God, his will, and of our attachment to his divine action. If God is hit-or-miss in my life, my obedience and involvement with spiritual life can only at best be hit-or-miss as well. As the Psalms wisely point out, we become what we worship.

We can only acquiesce to the divine will moment by moment if we fore-mostly understand that God is there with his will moment by moment.

Once we are living the responsibilities of our routine state of life, it is likely that the obligations of love and the movement of God in our lives will ask of us something beyond the regular duties or something more deeply hidden within them.

_{“…God may require certain actions which are not included among these duties, although in no way contrary to them … and the most perfect course for souls whom god is leading in this way is to add what is inspired to what is commanded.” (Page 15)}

Here we are expected to be subjective, as the indicators for the legitimacy and proximity to the will of God are “spiritual attraction and inspiration.”

Our guide expects us to be able to discern between our attraction to things that appear to be spiritual, or things that we think would make us more spiritual, and submission to the will of God. The former is a type of self-love; the latter, self-abandonment. We are often warned by the mystics not to become too mystical about our own spirituality. The pursuit of the appearance of spirituality merely leads to more of that “spurious fullness” that Father C mentioned on Page 12.

The quest for a good-looking spirituality and the quest to live in submission to the divine will can be worlds apart. Both will satisfy, but one of the satisfactions is false.

_{“If self-love is the motive on which we act … we shall always be poor in the midst of an abundance that is not of god’s design.” (Page 16)}

Father C makes his case here by pointing out that some of the saints “live in obscurity” and avoid the deadly dangers of the world by separating themselves from it. Yet, he says, it is not their separation from the world that produces their sanctity, but their submissive adherence to God’s designs.

This is a subtle shift of thought that must be present if we are to dedicate ourselves truly to God’s design rather than a spiritual design of our own making. It has long been an error of the holiness movement within evangelicalism that the avoidance of worldliness was thought to yield a strong personal spirituality. This perhaps swept the house clean, but it did not then go on to fill the house with God’s presence. Any oddball trend could wander in and pose as truth.

Thus, in my time, the absence of dancing meant the presence of holiness. In my grandparents’ time, the absence of a pool table meant holiness. There was a time when the absence of baseball meant the presence of holiness. You can see how holiness becomes ill-defined as it becomes nothing but reactionary to current trends of popular thought. Sanctity is much more than that. We should say it is much more divine than that.

I don’t think any of us realizes how profoundly a shoddy definition of sanctity has crippled our spiritual life. If we truly believe that the absence of misbehavior produces spiritual life, we may as well plant butterflies in the soil and say we have a living butterfly garden.