Weekly Meditations

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.     Mat. 6:10

There is no more succinct way of expressing the dynamic union of heaven and earth than in Jesus’ petition to our Father that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  It is a prayer that has absolute implications for all of creation as well as for the minutiae of our individual lives.  Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a 17th century Jesuit spiritual director best summarized this petition when he wrote, “Let God’s will be done; that is the whole of Scripture, the universal law.”

God calls us to conform to the movement of His will.  It is an imperative that comes not from an autocratic need on God’s part but from the loving hope the Creator has for His creatures. For it is only in submission to God’s movement that we ever fully become who we are.  As de Caussade puts it, “saints become saints only by living the life to which they have been called.”

To apply this petition to ourselves—to say to God “Thy will be done in me as it is in heaven”—requires nothing short of the same type of obedience that Jesus demonstrated in His own life when he said, “Whatever I see the Father do I do” (Jn 5:19).  Like Jesus, it is in our submission to the Spirit that God’s particular will becomes evident in our lives.  De Caussade writes of the close relationship between our self-offering and God’s will being manifest.

Obedience to God’s undefined will depends entirely on our surrender to it, our preparedness to do anything, or nothing.  Like a tool that, though it has no power in itself, when in the hands of the craftsman, can be used for any purpose within the range of its capacity and design.  Such souls are like molten metal, filling whatever vessel God chooses to pour them into.

St. Frances de Sales, a spiritual director who lived a century earlier, also spoke of such fluidity in our submission.  In his book, Introduction to the Devout Life, he writes,

We must always be rendering ourselves pliable and tractable to God’s good pleasure, as though we were wax.  A hundred times during the day we should turn our gaze upon God’s loving will, making our own will melt into it.

We also have the contemporary example of Mother Teresa who sought to live her life in perfect submission to God’s will.  Far from passive, such obedience requires the greatest degree of self-control and spiritual focus in its offering.  Mother Teresa speaks of the progressive maturity that a life of submissiveness will entail.  She writes,

The first duty required of souls is self-discipline; the second is self-surrender; the third requires great humility, a humble and willing disposition and a readiness to follow the movement of grace which motivates everything if we simply respond willingly to all its guidance.

These are people who know, each in their own way, what it means to intentionally submit their will to God’s.  And they have all, as de Caussade suggested, become who they are, and born such a wonderful influence on life, as the direct result of their desire for God’s will to be done in them as it is in heaven.

The prayer within all prayer is “Thy will be done.”  My prayer is Thy Will.  Thou didst create it in me.  It is more Thine than mine.

P.T. Forsyth

Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart. Mat. 11:29

Paul encouraged the Christians in Ephesus to ”be completely humble and gentle” (Eph. 4:2). Jesus also, from the perfection of His own example, invites us to emulate these same traits. They are evidence of grace in Christians who, because of their faith, are gently poised in relationship to all the circumstances of their lives.

The spirit of gentleness receives life graciously, without need to manipulate or force it to be other than it is. It measures its own engagement with life more minimally than the spiritual footprint left by those who are anxious. We lose the gentle spirit whenever our lives are overly defined by impatience, or by imperatives for the way things should be.

In his book, Spirituality and the Gentle Life, Adrian Van Kaam describes the gentle person as “one in whom there is a friendly accord between themselves and their life situation.” This disposition is most expressive of faith and grace. Van Kaam describes the freedom that gentleness produces in us.

Gentleness is an attitude of letting be, combined with a patient abiding with myself or with the person, task, or problem God calls me to be involved in. This attitude leads to peace and contentment. The gentle person is more free. He can take himself and the world as they are because he feels free to be himself and to let all things be with the same gentility.

Gentleness is also directly related to our experience of God. Aggressiveness of spirit diminishes our congeniality—the trait most needed to live in communion with the humility of God. It is difficult to be open to the gentle spirit of Christ when we find ourselves in an agitated state. Gentleness, therefore, is a prerequisite to remaining in sensate relationship with God. In the spirit of gentleness it becomes easier to pray, to meditate, and to stay attuned to the movements of God’s Spirit. Van Kaam writes,

Gentle reflection proceeds in an atmosphere of leisure and repose. Its quiet presence to divine things is animated by a desire to be at home with God in love—a love that itself is a grace of God.

The more gentle we are in relationship to God’s presence within us, the more hospitable we will seem to the Spirit. As St. John of the Cross noted, “God dwells in some souls as though in His own house; in others He dwells as though a stranger in a strange house, where they do not permit him to do or touch anything.” A gentle soul is more disposed to welcome God’s movement than someone who feels they need to control their spiritual experience.

Jesus presents Himself as gentle and humble of heart. He then invites us to be closely yoked with Him in the character of His life. By imitating Christ in these virtues we prepare an environment for the Lord to more fully dwell in us, as though in His own house.

What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him.

1John 3:2

When he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!  I will set out and go back to my Father”
Luke 15:17-18

There are two distinct life experiences that serve to re-awaken in us the need to “go back to our Father’s house.”  More often than not we are motivated by either a strong experience of desire, or one of suffering.  And it would be easy to imagine which one our Father would prefer for us.

Feelings of love and desire for God naturally lead us to more intently seek relationship.  When people are first dating, no one has to remind the guy to call the girl, or for either of them to keep their Friday nights open just in case there might be an opportunity to get together.  Love keeps the other person in mind and there is nothing more important than being together.  There are times when our relationship with God is motivated by a similar attraction of love.

But there is another motivation that comes from a more desperate expression of our need for God.  This usually happens when we have been trying for too long to live the Christian life on our own.  Like a branch that has withered, we feel burdened and discouraged about our lives.  We are flailing and yet we persist in this mode even though our plight seems more and more hopeless.  We reach a point where we feel we can go no further.  We are ready to give up.  And yet, somehow, we still stubbornly persist.  Eventually our circumstances and the gradual drying up of our wills force us, usually as a last resort, to return to God.  It was a long time in coming, but suffering finally brought us back to our senses.

The painful result of living life on his own terms was what motivated the prodigal son to finally decide to return to his father’s house.  From the father’s point of view, it was surely grievous that this recourse was necessary.  But such is the high risk that God has taken in granting us the freedom to choose Him, or not.

There is wisdom to be gained from the experience of inner distress when, for lack of God, we suffer unnecessarily in our lives.  This type of pain eventually teaches us that an ounce of prevention is better than the pound of cure needed to recover our stability and peace in God. The art of spiritual maintenance then becomes a matter of recognizing the very desire we feel for God as a gift that we are to cherish and not take for granted.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “God sometimes uses pain, like a megaphone, to get our attention.”  May we learn to avoid, as much as possible, the necessity for such by more readily heeding the still small voice that reminds us of our love and desire for God.  Even now, it whispers to all who are straying, “it is time to come home to the Father.”

The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind—
Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
So they might be one heart and mind with us.                                                                   John 17:22-23 (The Message)

Many of us operate from a much more dualistic sense of spirituality than we ought to.  We tend to see and act as though God were wholly “other.”  We imagine our relationship with God as with One who accompanies us, helps us, counsels us, but who is ostensibly apart from us.  How is this different from Jesus’ relationship with His Father?  And how does Jesus’ prayer—that we would be one with God just as He and the Father are one—address this?

Mother Teresa was one among many saints who understood the spirituality of a life lived in tandem with God’s movement.  She taught her sisters the importance of this theology when she wrote,

We must be aware of our oneness with Christ, as he was aware of his oneness with his Father. Our activity is truly apostolic only in so far as we permit him to work in and through us – with his power, his desire, his love.

Jesus told us plainly that, apart from Him, we can do nothing (John 15:4).   Instead of seeking God for our marching orders, and then assuming the task of deploying these, we should rather seek, as Jesus did, God’s direct movement within us as the very power by which we do all things.  This is the gift of the New Testament whereby our obedience to God is to be sought through the impulse of the Holy Spirit, .  As the Lord assures us through the prophet Ezekiel, “I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees” (Eze. 36:26-27).

Jesus offers the example of His own life as a model for the type of relationship we are to anticipate.  Because He desires to share this one-ness with us, Jesus prays that we would be united with the Trinity, just as He and the Father are.  Mother Teresa reiterates this hope to her sisters and highlights its relationship to prayer .

Our lives must be connected with the living Christ in us. If we do not live in the presence of God, we cannot go on.  If you don’t pray, your presence will have no power; your words will have no power.

No other definition exists for the nature of our unity with God than the one Jesus Himself offered when He said,  “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love” (Jn. 15:10).  Jesus’ “commands” are simply the prompts of His indwelling Spirit moving us, from within, to be conformed to God’s will.   There is no other way to live the Christian life than in unity with Christ.  Mother Teresa saw this as essential to anything we would call spiritual in our lives.  She wrote,

Prayer is the very life of oneness, of being one with Christ.  Therefore, prayer is as necessary as the air, as the blood in our body, as anything to keep us alive – to keep us alive to the grace of God.  Ask the Holy Spirit to pray in you. Learn to pray, love to pray, and pray often. Feel the need to pray and want to pray.

The apostle Paul boldly declared that, “the life I live is not my own, it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal, 2:20).  Can we say the same about ourselves?  If not, what adjustments do we need to make in order for this statement to be true for us as well?  The honest answers to these questions should make clear to us the spiritual direction we are being called to as we grow in our unity with God.

The whole progress of the soul consists in its being moved by God; but our own part remains in placing it in “a state to receive this motion”

St. John of the Cross.

No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD.   Jer. 31:34

I often think I have the best job in the world.  As a spiritual director, I get a ring-side seat to God’s story as it unfolds in the lives of people who are growing in their knowledge and experience of the Lord’s presence.  But this word from Jeremiah is also something I long for—the day when I, and every other pastor, teacher and spiritual director will be out of a job.  “No longer will one person tell another, ‘Know the Lord,’” the prophet writes,  “for they will all know me.”  In the meantime there is a particular insight that gives me confidence that the slow and painstaking work we do in encouraging deeper relationships with God is somehow related to the transformation of the whole world.

There is an urban legend called the “hundredth monkey” that represents something of this phenomenon.  The hundredth-monkey effect is a supposed event in which, once a critical number is reached, a learned behavior spreads instantaneously from one group to another.   The hypothesis first showed up in Lawrence Blair’s book, Rhythms of Vision (1975) where studies were cited of scientists observing macaque monkeys on the Japanese island of Koshima.  They noticed that some of these monkeys were learning how to wash mud off their food before eating it.  The researchers then claimed that once a critical number of monkeys had adopted this behaviour—the so-called hundredth monkey—this evolutionary instinct somehow spontaneously spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.  For no apparent reason, they too started experimenting with washing their food.  The story has since been used by others as a parable to support the hope of raising global consciousness in matters of ecology and social justice.

Could this also be what happens in a church, or a nation as more and more people learn to relate to God through prayer? Whether this story is true or not I do believe that something similar happens in the spirituality of community when a quorum of its members start moving more in step with the Spirit of God.

In his book, The Heart of the Parish: a Theology of the Remnant, Martin Thornton applies this type of thinking to parish work.  He recognizes the many different relationships to spirituality found in any given community saying, “each of our parishes contain the few really faithful, the occasional churchgoer, and everyone else.”  Thornton sees these different strata as concentric circles of intimacy with God where the influence of the center pervades the whole.  The few faithful believers—the remnant, as he calls them—are the ones who mysteriously anchor the whole community to the depths of spirituality.  According to Thornton, the church and ultimately the whole world depend and revolve around the faithful endeavour of the remnant.   He writes,

The Remnant, far from being an amputated segment, the clique detached from the whole, is at the centre of the parochial organism and of power extending beyond it. It is the very heart which recovers and serves the whole.

The concept of remnant theology can be quite motivating if we see our individual growth as benefitting the whole.  Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when He said, “For their sakes, I sanctify myself” (Jn. 17:19). Consider Thornton’s premise that as you mature as an individual in the knowledge of God you are somehow contributing to the maturity of all.  How does your own spiritual transformation serve the emerging freedom of all creation?  Paul implies something of this when he writes that  “the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons and daughters of God to be revealed” (Rom. 8:19).

In quantum physics, we are reminded of the great mystery of our interconnectedness, where a butterfly flapping its wings in Australia is somehow related, in effect, to a tornado in Texas. Even if there are only a few people growing in their knowledge of God, it will make a difference to the whole church, to society and to the world.  Somehow, through God’s mysterious economy, it will add truth and depth to the spiritual direction of all creation.