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In last week’s column, I meditated on the surrender of Mary and Jesus in the key moments of the Annunciation and the Agony in the Garden.
We all know the difficulty of handing over our wills to the Lord.
We want to be in control, have a clear idea of how events should unfold, and we often think God is letting us down when we face disappointment, tragedy, and suffering.
How do we find peace amidst the storm and trust in the middle of life’s chaos?
Timely insights
I have reflected here before on Abandonment to Divine Providence, a collection of reflections which Fr. Jean Pierre de Caussade, a French Jesuit, penned for the community of nuns which he served as a spiritual director.
His insights are illuminating, practical, and liberating, never more timely than right now as we seek to navigate the current complexity of life.
While God never directly wills evil things to befall us, He certainly allows catastrophe to strike.
While clearly discerning what God wills versus what He allows may be a mystery beyond our comprehension, Caussade asserts that nothing happens to us that falls outside of God’s plan for our salvation.
This central theological point illuminates all that follows.
All the frustrations, contradictions, difficulties, and tragedies which erupt in the course of every human life contain within themselves the seeds of grace, obedience, surrender, love, patience, and ultimately salvation.
This conviction helps us take the long view when faced with the cross in its many sizes and shapes.
Instead of immediately reacting in anger, sadness, and impatience, can we view the bad things in life from the angle of heaven and ask ourselves: Can I trust that God is working His purposes out here and I have something both to learn and give to others as I embrace this particular cross?
Caussade says, “Souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous, and the most mortifying things that happen to them in their lives, honor everything equally with delight and rejoicing, and welcome with open arms what others dread and avoid.”
Challenging words.
God’s will is manifest in the present
God’s will is clearly manifest in the present moment, Caussade asserts.
Whether I am cooking a meal, reading a book, engaged in an intensive project at work, praying, or conversing with a friend, God asks me to be fully present to the task at hand and there discover the divine will.
What is the point of dreaming of doing a heroic act of sacrifice for God, dying as a martyr, or becoming a great saint, if I cannot fully embrace the seemingly mundane tasks before me with joy, generosity, and a sincere desire to make my best effort?
The saints could only do great things for God because they had embraced the martyrdom of the ordinary and routine.
This awareness demands that we live in the present moment.
Indeed, Caussade calls it “the sacrament of the present moment.”
When I am sad, angry, afraid, or regretful, I have gone either to the past or the future.
Most of the time, the present moment is perfect and how wrong would it be if my mind and heart were consistently somewhere else.
If I am not fully engaged in what lies before me, if I am looking past the person I am speaking with to find someone more interesting, if I daydream of being somewhere else or even somebody else, I miss out on my life because I am never fully HERE.
Caussade writes, “The present moment is always full of infinite treasure. It contains far more than you can possibly grasp. Faith is the measure of its riches: what you find in the present moment is according to the measure of your faith.”
Living in the present moment is challenging
Living in the present moment is very challenging.
To do so requires that we silence the voice within which constantly makes judgments, calculations, plans, criticisms and holds hypothetical conversations in imagined scenarios.
How many things I worried about never happened and how many things I never anticipated came out of nowhere with great force?
Prayer requires us to sit in the present moment and simply abide in God’s presence, the most simple thing to do and yet the most difficult.
When I go on a retreat, it takes several days just to quiet my thoughts and enter into the silence.
Perhaps one of the hidden blessings of this past year is the fact that we have been forced to reduce our activity and rushing around, spend more time with loved ones, and be more reflective.
In this season of Lent, we enter the desert with the Lord, where He was driven for forty days immediately after His baptism, to fast, pray to the Father, and confront the temptations of the Evil One.
In the solitary quiet of that present moment, Jesus prepared Himself for His public ministry, which was filled with exhausting days of preaching, teaching, healing, forgiving, listening, and loving.
How many ensuing nights did He go off to a deserted place to spend the whole night in communion with the Father?
The Lord found prayer more energizing than sleep.
I wish I could get to that point!
If the Son of God felt the need to be present to the Father that much, how much more should I?
It certainly is no accident that this silent, abiding, consoling, Eucharistic life of Jesus Christ among us is the “Real Presence.”
This Lent invites us to be present to Him.