God's will is always present, even if we can't do the math

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 10-

We will want some reassurance through all this talk of God’s “will” and his “secret operations,” lest we be left to tread water as best we can in angry, unsearchable seas with no night sky or compass to assist us. The topic of God’s will often gets very weird, very quickly.

When the subject is spirituality, we cannot be blamed for speaking and writing from a less-familiar perspective than, say, traffic regulations or a casserole recipe. This does not mean that “spiritual” should be equated with “ethereal.” There should be no offshoot of the faith that takes us into the land of dreams and fantasies. When we advance towards the spiritual, we are not abandoning the real. With a proper world view that includes God, the believer is the one who can work with the spiritual aspect of things and maintain footing in reality.

Although spiritual subjects are not usually as precise as something like diesel mechanics, they are not merely voices in the mist either. As Caussade’s book progresses, more becomes clear. We start to see a spiritual landscape with recognizable features forming as we give some of this thinking at least an owl’s glance in our heart to bear the fruit of understanding and of making connections between what we might call theoretical spirituality and practical spirituality. Obviously, Caussade’s chief aim in teaching as he does is to assist in the holiness of his hearers; not just in posing ideas, but in hopeful and helpful thinking so that his students may more firmly unite themselves to the divine action of God in every moment.

“Every moment” is indeed the cantus firmus in Caussade’s thought:

_{“the present moment is always the ambassador who declares the order of god … the ‘one thing necessary’ is always to be found by the soul in the present moment.” (Page 33)}

There is no escaping how central and how vital the good father makes the God-filled moment to the believer. And he is not merely asking or even demanding that we see this as he sees it. Rather he is expounding for us what the “moment” truly is – what it contains and what it means to those who seek to follow God.

Our guide is going to show us how to perceive the will of God in each moment as the “one thing necessary” always present therein. This phrase, which Caussade puts in quotes at least twice in this section, has to be a reference to the words of Jesus to Martha in the Gospel of Luke, (10:38-42) while visiting the house of Martha and Mary.

As the New Jerusalem Bible renders it, Martha “was distracted with all the serving,” while Mary was seated “at the Lord’s feet and listened to him speaking.”

Both women were sharing the same moment with Jesus in the same house, and yet they were worlds apart. When we realize that Martha was interrupting Jesus, who was “speaking,” and indicated that she would rather have Jesus be quiet so Mary would free herself from her place of respect for Jesus, we start to see how outrageously Martha was behaving. She was busy serving, but she was missing the moment. Many preachers have tried to give Martha the benefit of the doubt here, saying that we always need someone to look after the details. However, the idea here is that Martha was missing the point. When Jesus is in the house, priorities change.

Here is where Jesus says to Martha: “You worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one.” The New American Standard Bible translates this, “only one thing is necessary.”

Father C assures us that “the one thing necessary” will faithfully present itself in the instances of life, so that the moment will produce what it should according to “God’s design.” (Page 33)

Caussade reveals even more weight and glory present in the moment, as he reminds us that “the sufficiency of grace” from God is made current and accessible in the moment. Thus, everything in the life of the self-abandoned becomes a means to holiness and a means to understanding that God is hidden there “by so many veils, or shadows or names…” (Page 34)

_{“what happens at each moment bears the imprint of the will of god and of his adorable name.” (Page 35)}

With what greater courage, then, can we face what the moment brings us; knowing that it is God in the garb of the ordinary, or God clothed in the difficulty we meet, or God cloaked in the suffering we encounter. God and his everything is still present in our many darknesses with a light that is known only by the heart kindled by its love of him, and enlightened by its faith.

Does this mean that once we realize the moment is his divine action, God will make himself obvious, remove his disguise and then explain to our satisfaction what is happening and, of ultimate importance to us, why it is happening? No. Even the most mystical of the mystics would not expect God to submit a paper outlining his ways and his thoughts on the matter. Rather, the heart learns to accept God’s presence and to back away from its demand for an explanation.

Here is a page from my own ordinary life. While writing on this very section it happens that it had become necessary for our family to have our cocker-spaniel put to sleep. For months I had denied that this had to happen, but it became clearer with each passing day that, since they don’t have convalescent homes for dogs, we would have to make the final move.

Taking her to the veterinarian was no easy task. Even so, I kept thinking that this, too, must be divine action hidden in this awful moment. For me this was my heart’s acknowledgement that God was present and involved. It was never clearly stated how he was present and involved – no miraculous healing of my dog in the lobby, for example. There was only a quiet courage.

In that moment, when many other things seemed unclear, my only solid thought was that God was in this and was available and accessible. I can’t really say I felt better. I can only say my heart had a knowing of something beyond what was happening.