TRIUMPH OF THE WILL?

 

Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we say – with one of those mysterious optatives – “Thy will be done, in earth as it is in Heaven.” So that with each recital of the most famous Christian prayer, we brush up against one of faith’s most stubborn mysteries: the Will of God. We know that we ought to do God’s will; we know that our will ought to be aligned with God’s; but how do we know what God wills?

            When we are dealing with our own choices, the subject is not terribly hard. God the Father may be silent to our clumsy ears, but we know that “he who has seen me has seen the Father” and so, when faced with a choice or a decision, we can ask ourselves some version of the question WWJD --  What Would Jesus Do? The answer to that is not always simple, as there are many situations in an average life that did not present themselves to Yeshua when He walked the earth, or that the chroniclers of the Gospels did not see fit to include in their accounts. But still, we can often have an idea of the way we might usefully follow. 

            Where it get much more difficult is when it comes to distinguishing God’s will in the life and the world around us. Yeshua was not clear on the topic. He points out that when the tower of Siloam fell and killed a number of bystanders, those who died were not greater sinners that others (Luke 13:4-5); but he does not say whether or not God willed the tower’s fall or the people’s death. He says that not a sparrow falls “without your Father” (Matthew 10:29) but the Greek áneu “without” does not decide whether it is without the Father’s knowledge or without His will. And in both cases, the point he is making is different.

            Does God “will” all that occurs? There might be a case to be made to that effect: He is, after all, supposed to both all-knowing (omnisciens) and all-powerful (omnipotens); does it not follow that nothing occurs without His willing it? Thomas Aquinas, in the twelve articles on the Will of God in his Summa theologica, comes uncomfortably close to this position. And I say “uncomfortably” because when we consider such an explanation, we almost universally rebel. If (to take a recent happening in France) a madwoman tortures and murders a 12-year-old girl, did God will that? Does God will the suffering and death of the Ukrainian civilians in Boucha? Does God will the death of 600 people in a tsunami in Indonesia?

            This very proper revolt on our part leads some people to dismiss any idea of God’s existence: if such a God existed, they say, He would be a monster. But for those of us whose faith, though put to a severe test by this, subsists, it does so perhaps because of a third attribute we ascribe to God: not only all-powerful and all-knowing but all-good. This raises two questions: 1) how, then, do the events I described relate to His will? and 2) how, in view of a world in which such things occur, should we align our wills to His?

            I have previously written about the first question: the fact that His nature is love implies that He must of necessity allow us free will. Love’s very nature means that its reciprocity can never be forced or commanded. This, then, explains the occasional flourishing of human evil. He cannot command us to return His love: it is the only limit to omnipotence. The horrifying effects of natural phenomena, on the other hand, resist explanation. One can only assume that He, for reasons of His own, has decided not to micromanage His creation. (It is interesting that, even if we accept this, we still have an instinct for spontaneously giving thanks when we have a narrow escape.)

            The second question is the real purpose of this post. It assumes that we do not, and cannot, know whether anything that happens to us does so with, or because of, God’s will; and that He is much more concerned with our reaction to the happening than with the event itself. The point Yeshua was making about the sparrow was not whether the Father intended it to fall or not, but that if it falls, it does not do so at random and anonymously. And you, he said, are worth a lot more than a sparrow: hence, he did not say but did not need to, at the moment of any occurrence that involves you, you are surrounded by your Father’s loving attention. And hence, we may conclude, it is at that moment that we may or may not do His will. Where His infinite care for us operates, but cannot command us because of love and free will, is in relation to our reaction to the, to any, event. 

            He does not will that we shall win four million dollars in a lottery; but He pays close attention to what we think, feel, and do when we have won it. He did not will that such-and-such a young woman should die of breast cancer; but He surrounded her with His loving spirit during the ordeal (whether or not she recognised that spirit’s origin) and He attends with love and hope to the reactions of her family and friends. 

            At no time is discerning and/or doing His will easy. The crusaders who in 1096 AD went into battle shouting “Deus lo volt! Deus lo volt!” (“God wills it!” in Romance Latin) were perhaps, to our modern minds, rash if not painfully misguided; but are we sure we would feel as strongly if that phrase accompanied a Ukrainian counterattack? A special degree of caution is perhaps needed when trying to discern God’s will for human beings in the plural and collective; it would appear wise to practice humility in discernment and limit ourselves, as much as possible, to individual matters.

            Finally, we should not forget that Yeshua both taught and showed us the overwhelming and permanent need for prayer. Aligning our will to God’s can only be done after, and in, prayer. Perhaps this is a secondary meaning of the optative. We are not simply told “Do God’s will”; we are invited into a process that involves much more than our individual selves. “God’s will be done.” Amen.   

"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS"? OH, SURE

I am currently translating into English a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk, and though it might be useful to share one or two things I have learnt from it. Today, a word about prayer of intercession. All of us who pray know what it is to pray for others, from the most intimate prayer for a loved one to the prière universelle that is part of every Mass and other church services. And all of us know, and grieve at, the fact that so many of those prayers seem to go unheard or at any rate unfulfilled. We know that our reaction must be “Thy will be done,” but we still wonder at that will and at what look like its vagaries. 

My Carthusian suggests we look at this differently. First, we should cease to imagine intercessory prayer as an attempt to influence, push or divert the Lord, to change His mind, to alter what He was originally going to do. All prayer, he says, is originally God’s initiative. St Paul says that it is the Spirit that prays in us; and so in the fact that at this moment I am praying for X I am aligning myself with God’s initiative. 

Secondly, just as the air around us is filled with waves of all kinds that we do not perceive unless we have a receiver and turn it on, so that same air is filled with prayers, a kind of quærosphere. God hears all prayer, but it must also be received by the beneficiary – a fact which, in the name of love and its necessary liberty, God cannot guarantee. 

Thirdly, as Huck Finn found and as I have mentioned several times in these posts, it is no use praying for fishhooks. God does not micromanage His creation. The extreme conclusion from this is that all we can truly pray for, concerning someone else, concerning X, is X’s salvation. And that prayer’s efficacy depends on whether X’s receiver for such prayers is turned on. If it is, the prayer will be granted. 

To add a point of my own: what about the prayers for healing and so on? Apart from the fact that God does not micromanage Creation, I am convinced that they are nevertheless effective in a certain way, especially if the beneficiaries know that they are prayed for. I believe that such prayer creates a small or large tidal flow of spiritual support that in itself helps the healing process.

I believe it was St Thomas Aquinas who wrote that the only way prayer can be effective is if it is a) for oneself, b) pious, and c) insistent. I see the point of this, and b) and c) are important; but a) should not be abandoned, even in the face of what sometimes seems to be a great and uncaring silence. Intercessory prayer, after all, is a genuine form of loving. Perhaps for a) we should substitute “with our eyes open,” clear-headedly, intelligently and without illusion. Then b) piously: we should put our whole hearts into it, in hope and trust; and c) insistently: like the widow in Jesus’ parable who importuned the unjust judge till he gave her what she wanted just to get rid of her, God smilingly allows us to bother him.

NOT THE WILL TO POWER

Orthodox icon: Christ and Moses

In his meditation on the perfect all-purpose prayer, I imagine Yeshua, having hallowed the Name (Baruch HaShem) and expressed hope for the coming of the malkut, the kingship, the Reign, now turning to the Divine Will. This flowed naturally from its predecessor: if a king reigns, his subjects do his will. What is God’s will? The Hebrew ratzon, when linked to the Deity, leads one directly to the Torah: God’s Will for Israel – and, eventually, for humanity – is that they keep his commandments, his statues, his testimonies. By itself the prayer that this be done is large and seems adequate for a Divine instruction; but Yeshua here added “on earth as it is in heaven” (ba’arets ka’asher na’asah vashamayim). In a sense this multiplies it: we pray that His will may be done on earth, not imperfectly in our usual sloppy human way, but the way it is done in Heaven, in His own presence, where the Reign is eternal and accomplished. There, we may imagine, His will is naturally done; and since His nature is Love, the natural doing of His will is a permanent activity of love, involving all the inhabitants of Heaven. Although we cannot equal this, we can strive for it.

Whether, when he composed the prayer, he already knew it or not, Yeshua was (to be) the new Torah: the divine commandments became two, then eventually one: first, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind and strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves; then, simply, to love and follow Yeshua Meshiach in everything.

 For earthling humans, though, questions remain. If we are to help bring about that Reign where his Will is done, we nevertheless ask ourselves, on almost a daily basis, what God’s will is. In this or that situation, hypothetical, actual or urgent, what should A do? Similarly, and sometimes even more anguishingly, what, in all that happens, does so by God’s will? If we say to someone “I’ll see you next month, Deo volente”, what does that imply?

It is comforting for us to remember that Yeshua himself faced this problem. When, in Gethsemane, he prays that the bitter cup he faces may be taken from him, he ends, “Yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt”. In that case at least, the Father’s will was clear: the Son’s sacrifice had to be carried through to the end.

We are often, and rightly, taught not to confuse our desire with God’s will. Even in an apparently good cause, Deus vult is more often than not a projection and thus an error. Sometimes an attitude of suspicion, particularly toward ourselves, is salutary. On the other hand, neither should we fall into the trap of assuming the Divine will always to be the opposite of our own. It is independent of us, and of our desire. How to discern it, then?

I think that the best way is to remember the nature of the God who wills. His nature is Love. Whatever is congruent with Love at its highest may safely be considered congruent with His will. Which brings us back to the conflation of commandments in the new Alliance: 10 > 2 > 1. The eu-angelion, the authoritative good message, is precisely that: that doing God’s will is no longer a matter of memorising and following detailed rules, but of being definitively touched by the absolute, sacrificial Love of the Anointed One, and transforming one’s heart, mind and life accordingly. We are still stumbling earthlings, and will never do it as completely or as elegantly as the angels: but that, we may be assured, will be taken into account.

Once we have been touched by that Love, all we really need to do is (as I wrote before) to keep our shutters, our windows, and our doors wide open to the grace that is poured upon us unceasingly: Grace Abounding. It will fill us gradually, until perhaps one day, like Myriam Yeshua’s Mother, we will be gratia plena.

A TWO-LETTER WORD

Thinking about the infinite depth and variety that is the Lord’s Prayer, I was struck by the two appearances in it of the word “as”.

‘Thy will be done, on earth AS it is in Heaven’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses (or: debts) AS we forgive them that trespass against us’.

Extraordinary. I’ve written earlier about the curious use of the optative in the Lord’s Prayer’s first three petitions; and the AS brings home the full mysteriousness. Let God’s will be done here on earth; let us help God’s will be done here on earth; let us do God’s will here on earth; but how? ‘AS it is [done] in Heaven.’

Thinking about this makes one realise that AS can have two different if related meanings: ‘to the same extent’ and ‘in the same manner’. Which is meant here? Possibly both; but it can surely never be done here, on grubby old Earth, to the extent that it is done in Heaven? So we are forced back to ‘in the same way’. And the question that arises at once is: how do we know the way God’s will is done in Heaven? We can only know this by various forms of extrapolation.

The first is by extrapolation from Earth, and us, in all our incompleteness, spoiltness (in every sense), and bloody mess. Without fantasising, we do I think rightly assume Heaven to be the opposite of those conditions. So when we look at the way God’s will tends to be ‘done’ at all here, we can look at that doing’s incompleteness, its spoiltness (in every sense) and its bloody mess, and weep. The bloody mess is that of those who assume God’s will to be the massacre of all they consider as His enemies. The spoiltness is that of those who assume God’s will to be their own comfort and prosperity, and/or those who spoil and deform other’s attempts to do God’s will out of anger, envy or cynicism. The incompleteness is that of all of us, who invariably ‘leave undone that which we ought to have done, and do those things which we ought not to have done.’

Battlefield of Verdun, 1916

The beauty is that God has given us the gift of imagination. Although we cannot reach perfection, we can imagine it. Although by our own efforts and on earth we cannot reach Heaven, we can imagine it. As Keats wrote in a letter: ‘I believe in . . . the truth of imagination. The imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it true.’ If the imagination is joined to the humility of prayer, it may help to save us.

So if – knowing that we cannot accomplish anything by our own efforts – we consider doing God’s will AS it is in Heaven, we know that such a doing is complete, unspoilt and clean. We also know that we can’t do that. Hence, perhaps, the optative, with its deliberate ambiguity and passive voice. ‘Let (or: may) thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.’ By whom? Not by us, messy little sinners that we are. Not directly by God himself: he doesn’t work that way much as we’d like him to. No: if it gets done, it will be done only by him, through us. And if so, we should work at learning two things: opening our doors, windows and shutters to let the ruach, the pneuma, the spiritus sanctus in; and constantly imagining Heaven.

Heaven imagined: Carlo Carloni

There is of course another help we have: the one who taught us the prayer in the first place. He is the Law; we do God’s will by following him. The two ways are not contradictory; but following Yeshua Meshiach is full of contradictions, as anyone who has closely read the Gospels knows. WWJD never has an easy answer. So the first way I suggested may complement the second. Prayer is, in any case, the one constant essential.

I will write my next post on the second AS in the Lord’s Prayer. Stay tuned.

FROM A RUGGED AND THOROUGHLY MODERN MYSTIC

Thomas Merton in his handbuilt Kentucky hermitage

"We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. The only thing is we don't see it...I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

My Lord, God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. The fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does, in fact, please You. And I know that if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear. For you are ever with me; and You will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Thomas Merton

BEST WISHES?

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.”

Huck Finn’s predicament is both more general and more subtle than Twain makes it seem. Most prayer is beseeching. We ask for something. Usually, we are grown-up enough not to ask for fish hooks, or a video game, or a Corvette. But we have no problem asking to be allowed to get the job we are applying for, or a better grade on the exam, or for the person we are in love with to agree to have dinner. More importantly, we feel encouraged to pray for others: for our best friend’s mother to be healed of her cancer, for a 40-year-old acquaintance to recover mentally from being raped at 16, for an elderly lady’s arthritis to cease torturing her, for a friend’s husband in the last stages of Parkinson’s to be allowed a swift and not too painful end. Beyond that, moreover, we are encouraged to pray for peace in the Middle East, for reconciliation in the Ukraine, and for the end of murderous civil wars in a number of faraway countries.

“Ask, and you shall receive.” Really? The answer to all of the above prayers seems utterly arbitrary. Sometimes it’s yes, more often it’s no. Why? No one can tell us. Those who say that it is God’s Will are not only wrong, they are obscenely wrong. It is not God’s will that men torture and slaughter one another. But then, what is the answer to the enigma? It is difficult not to conclude that all those prayers are for fish hooks. That we are all Huck Finns, in church or out. As the French would say, our problem remains entire.

Thanksgiving – the impulse, not the festival – complicates matters. Most of us feel the need to give thanks when good things happen to us. But if the good things come from God, does that not mean that the bad ones do, too? Which would lead us to either a micro-managing but arbitrary Deity or to a kind of theistic fatalism that says that whatever is, is God’s will and therefore good, whatever we think it is.

After many years of pondering this, my provisional conclusion is that the answer was given by Jesus on that serenely beautiful hill above the Sea of Galilee which I had the privilege of visiting when my daughter was married in Nazareth. Having told people to stop worrying all the time about what will happen tomorrow, about having enough to eat, about having decent clothes, so forth, He said “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

If we apply this to prayer, it will show us – as, alas, it did not show Huck – what Miss Watson meant. “Ask, and you shall receive” is not a test to see if you know the password. It is the description of a law of God that works like a law of nature: a law of God’s nature, if you will. If we seek first the Kingdom of God; if we ask to know and love Him better; if we yearn to be filled with the Holy Spirit, whatever the cost; if we do that constantly, and go on doing so; then we shall  receive what we ask for, because the receiving is always already inherent in the constant asking.

And if we want to pray for others, once again we should ask for the same thing: that they may come to know and love Him better. For there is no good that we can ask for that is better or more important than that.

I cannot believe that God micromanages Creation. Microbes do their work just as mosquitoes do. Things live, things die. We live, we die. The difference is that we have a consciousness of love, which means that we have free will, which means that we are free to refuse love, i.e. to sin. So we have the capacity to add sin to death, which is horrible. On the other hand, if we seek the Kingdom of God – His reign, in us and elsewhere – and his righteousness, the integrity that is its hallmark, then all kinds of good attend us, because we will have become a certain kind of person, the kind that attracts good things like a magnet. It’s not a reward, it’s a consequence.

All the rest is fish hooks.

AGE

There grows an old after the early light

That swells and shrinks in melancholy hues:

Each green excess that copper autumn rues

Remembers under snow the swirling flight

Of swallows, and the starlings’ cloud of fright

Disturbed by creeping frost. No ring-dove coos

In the laborious mornings where death woos

The unsuspecting soul surprised by sight.

Age is a burden borne up a long hill,

Lit by the sunset’s glory on the stones

And trees , warmed by the final rays.

Memories fade, new views come to amaze

Eyes vexed and tired, eternal tones

Now swell and grow: His vast, advancing Will.

The image is of St Ado of Vienne (d. 875 AD), today's saint.