Light of the World

I keep thinking that I need to plan to make things happen.  By nature I am a planner.  I understand that in order to make things happen one has to set goals and create a plan to reach those goals.  This fact makes perfect sense to me.

The ways of God do not.

He seems to keep trying to teach me not to plan, not to try to make things happen.  Perhaps that is because I tend to get so caught up in making what I want to happen come to pass that I do not always see what is right before me.  Perhaps it is only that He wants me to remember that He is God and He can bring things to fruition more perfectly than I ever could of my own volition.

I am the light of the world.

How brightly He shines in the darkness of this world!  How brilliantly do His works shine when we can glimpse them like rays of the sunrise I saw this morning, beaming out from beneath the clouds.

I was blind and now I see.

Abandon Your Fantasies All Ye Who Enter Here

You seek for God, beloved soul, and He is everywhere, everything speaks of Him, everything offers Him to you, He walks beside you, He surrounds you and is within you.  He lives with you and yet you try to find Him.  You seek your own idea of God, although you have Him in His reality.  You seek perfection and you meet it in all that happens to you.  All you suffer, all you do, all your inclinations are mysteries under which God gives Himself to you while you are vainly straining after high-blown fancies.  God will never come to dwell with you clothed in these imaginings.

~*~

Those words from Abandonment to Divine Providence always strike me particularly, as do many passages therein.  It seems there is little to add by way of commentary, for de Caussade speaks so clearly and directly in this beautiful and mystical passage.

Perhaps in his mysticism, de Caussade speaks more to our hearts than our heads.  If so, then we must let go of our need to analyze, our desperation to know absolutely clearly, and our efforts to dissect reality into neat little labeled boxes.  Instead we must open our hearts to the presence of God who dwells within us, the presence of God who comes to us in a simple wafer of bread transubstantiated, and the Holy Spirit who whispers to us in the secret of our hearts.

In my spiritual journey, I have seen how our Lord has led me to draw nearer to Himself and to let go of all my false conceptions of who He is again and again, stripping away the layers of fantasy and bringing me back to the great and glorious reality.  Although that reality is less neat and perfect than my desires, it is ever so much more powerful and awe-inspiring.  His working truly amazes me when I can open my heart to see what my eyes cannot.

"We are our own aptest deceiver." - Goethe

"...he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—
that no human being can really understand another,
and no one can arrange another's happiness."

The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene

Those last two phrases in particular sound out in bold ringing tones, like a bell struck hard in an old abandoned church tower that grates out a harsh unused and funereal tone, scattering pigeons into flight and drawing the gaze of those working nearby in the fields.  So it might catch us, striking us out of the stolid comfort of our own assurance.

Sometimes we get caught up in thinking we can make others happy.  That desire often places upon us an undue burden, leading to pain or mental illness.  We may despair because of the impossibility of even understanding what will produce another's happiness.

In the sense of the above quotation, trying to arrange happiness becomes a sort of manipulation.  All too often that is exactly what our love is: an attempt to control others.  Thus even what is good—namely love, which is willing the good of the other—has become corrupt.  We may not realize how deep is the decay of our intentions.  We continue to deceive ourselves in focusing on doing the other good, but it is a good that ultimately seeks to give us a sort of power over them.

Similarly, the desire to please others leads us into the trap of manipulation.  The logic in our heads is as follows: if we do what others wish, they will be happy.  It is good logic.  The problem is in the premises; after all, receiving precisely what we want does not make us happy, ridiculous as that fact is.

Furthermore, as long as we are trying to force a result, we are manipulating, controlling, dominating.  We are not free to give and receive.  Henri Nouwen expresses this idea perfectly in his book called The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom:

"A lot of giving and receiving has a violent quality, because the givers and receivers act more out of need than out of trust.  What looks like generosity is actually manipulation, and what looks like love is really a cry for affection or support."

How many times have we gone to others looking for love, begging for them to fulfil our needs while trying to hide from them the fact that we were in need at all?  So many times we reach out in hope that another will fill the void within.  Sometimes we dare not even risk that much vulnerability and turn to pleasures instead.

Yet there is a way to break out of this crippling circle of insanity.  As Nouwen himself puts it, we must first experience love in the depths of our being:

"When you know yourself as fully loved, you will be able to give according to the other's capacity to receive, and you will be able to receive according to the other's capacity to give.  You will be grateful for what is given to you without clinging to it, and joyful for what you can give without bragging about it.  You will be a free person, free to love."

That is the key to achieving the liberty of being able to love generously: we must set others free from our desires for them and accept the fruit of our efforts and offerings made out of love, no matter whether we achieve success or failure.  We must do our duty and leave the rest to the One who is All-Powerful.

Yes, we must surrender our wills.  We must surrender everything to the Creator and Healer of our souls.

Yet if it is love we desire, how could we do better then to lay ourselves in whole-hearted surrender at the feet of the One who is Love?  It is hard many times to receive love from One so intangible.  It seems impossible to entrust ourselves to One so hidden.  How can we reasonably expect One so unseen to care for us?  And yet He does.  And He does so according to our capacity to receive, according to our surrender.

In the end, He is not after all so invisible.  It is we who are blind.