Why do we Fear ... Anything?
Scimus autem quoniam diligentibus
Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum.
And we know that to them
that love God, all things work together unto good
(Romans, 8.28)
Absolutely
nothing happens to us that God does not either expressly
will or permit for our sanctification,
for the salvation of our souls and the souls of countless others
of whom we know nothing ... yet.
Understanding this, we should fear nothing, although
we may not welcome everything.
Why ...
Why, then, do we fear?
In the
Pater Noster, the Our Father, given us by Christ Himself,
we find seven petitions, but let us focus carefully on one in particular
Thy will be done on earth
[that is to say, in everything pertaining to
our lives] as it is in Heaven.
in an effort to answer this very real question:
Our prayer,
our deepest desire which is (or should be) the perfect accomplishment
of God's most holy will within us (is there a greater good?) in
other words, the fulfillment of our lives in Christ is
contained in this one single petition in which every other petition
is implicitly uttered. Let us look at what we are asking of God
in this petition:
-
That
God fulfill within us perfectly His
most holy will not ours.
-
That
He make of us what pleases Him
not us.
-
That
He do with us what pleases Him
not us.
-
That
He give to us, as it pleases Him
not us.
1
-
That
He take from us what pleases Him
not us.
-
That
in our suffering, in union with Christ in the Garden
of Gethsemane even here we ask that He fulfill within us
perfectly His most holy will not as we
will, but as He wills.
2
Divine Complicity
Once we
have prayed this ex toto corde, completely from the heart
our life is no longer our own. It never was, but we have made
it explicit to ourselves. And upon praying this, our lives, together
with the world around us, change forever. We have entered into
a compact with God, into the very will of God which is the act of
God; in a word, into Divine complicity.
Everything,
then, that subsequently touches upon us: all that
we experience, all that we suffer, all that we endure everything:
our state in life, our poverty no less than our wealth, our illness
no less than our health, our adversities no less than our good fortune,
our ill-repute for His Name no less than our honor among men, the
cardboard over our head no less than the stately roof, the shabby
clothes no less than the elegant, the suffering no less than the
joy, the ridicule no less than the accolades all, all, we offer
to Him, accept from Him with equal gratitude
knowing
that they come to us from Him; that whatever our condition
in life, it is His will being mysteriously fulfilled within
us. This conviction, often painfully at odds with the suffering
within us and around us
is the great actus Fidei, or Act
of Faith against all the apparent evidence that contradicts it.
We do not understand what has become of us and we can adduce no
reason or purpose yet in holy simplicity and docility we accept
in faith that it is the very best thing possible for us even as
it apparently contradicts what appears to be good for us. It is,
in a word, total submission to the will of God in all things;
the taking of all things from the hand of God: the bitter as eagerly
as the sweet, realizing that we know nothing of what is good for
us apart from the express will of God revealed to us in Holy Scripture,
and the Teachings of Holy Mother the Church.
It may
never be revealed to us in this life but revealed it will be,
for die we must and after death, arrive at understanding. This hopelessly
entangled skein of misery, suffering, and misfortune only punctuated
by fleeting moments of respite, too brief to attain to any sustainable
happiness this dense reticulation of calcified knots, grown tighter
by the years, unyielding to the probe of reason all these utterly
involuted complexities will unfold as so many segments in the history
of our lives being drawn by the finger of God upon the fabric of
eternity. We do not understand any of them until we see the whole
which has been configured through them in the souls cooperating
with God in the dispensation of all things.
If, as
Saint Paul tells us, we cooperate with God in all things, it is
quite beside the point that we understand them, and very much to
the point that we accept them, play our part in them, all-unknowing
but still all-cooperating. Our lives are as so many golden threads
amid a myriad of others, and docilely we allow the hand of God to
weave this thread where He wills and how He wills. The moment we
resist the hand of God, tension ensues, and the whole fabric trembles
under it. Countless millions, billions, of other golden threads
are affected in places, times, regions, utterly remote to us and
unknown by us.
Who among
us can presume to follow to its utter end the concatenation of events
that are put in motion by the simplest act of a man? It moves in
unanticipated permutations that reverberate throughout the universe.
Every act is an exponential unto itself, and every subsequent movement
as it courses through time touches upon, changes, deflects, directs,
and in a thousand ways influences the lives of others in ways unguessed
and until the end of time as hidden in Christ as our very lives.3
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
_________________________
1
Naked came
I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the
Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: as it hath pleased the
Lord so is it done: blessed be the name of the Lord.
(Job 1.21)
2 And going a
little further, he fell upon his face, praying, and saying: My Father,
if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not
as I will, but as thou wilt. (Saint Matthew 26.39)
3 Colossians 3.3
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