God's will is never far away

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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.