The Will of God

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. “Now it came to pass, as he was saying these things, that a certain woman from the crowd lifted up her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the woman that bore you and the breast that nursed you.’ But he said: ‘Rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it!’” (Luke 11:27-28).

Somebody from the crowd begins to praise Our Lady and Our Lord seems to deflect that praise from the purely human up on to the supernatural, up on to a much higher level.

On another occasion He was told His Mother and His brethren were waiting outside. “And he said, ‘Who is my mother and my brother and sister? … Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’” (Matt. 12:47-50).

Again, Our Lord deflects the human praise of Our Lady in order to lift it up onto a higher plane. He elevates Our Lady, because she is the one who has most heard the Word of God and kept it, and fulfilled the Word of God in all sorts of ways.

In another place in St. Matthew, He says, “Everyone who hears these my words and does them shall be likened to a wise man that built his house upon a rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew. And they beat upon that house and it fell not, for it was founded on a rock” (Matt. 7:24-25). Rather beautiful words.

Our Lord speaks about the importance that our life, our vocation, everything we do, is somehow founded on rock, and that rock is the rock of fulfilling the Word of God, fulfilling the will of God above everything else.

Then it doesn't matter what happens. All sorts of things can come and go. If our vocation is founded on rock, then, no problem.

In the last few weeks there's been a lot of floods in various parts of Europe. Pictures have been appearing of towns full of water, full of mud, sometimes even houses being lifted up by the floods and washed away. These things happen because they were not founded on rock.

“And everyone that does not hear these my words and does not do them shall be like a foolish person that built out their house upon the sand. And the rains fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew. And they beat upon that house and it fell, and great was the fall thereof” (Matt. 7:26-27).

There may come a moment in our life when precisely that is what happens. The hurricane comes, the winds blow—a crucial moment then for us to discover that our life is founded upon rock, the rock fulfilling the will of God in everything that we do.

“My food,” Our Lord said, “is to do the will of God who sent me” (John 4:34).

We have various channels whereby we know that will of God: in the chat, in Confession, in the means of formation, in the notes that come from the Advisory, in the things that are communicated to us in the retreat, in the annual course.

The Holy Spirit speaks deep in our soul using these means. We have to listen very carefully. What is the will of God for me in this particular moment or this particular period of my life?

We can be sure that where we are—in this center, with this job, with these assignments, with this apostolic undertaking—this is the will of God for me in this particular moment.

To live in this particular country, in this particular city, in this particular center, with all these assignments—this is the will of God for me.

In my interior struggle, the things that are said to me, the things the Holy Spirit lets me see, or He wants me to read a little more, or focus a little more on my particular fight—that's the area in which God wants me to improve at this particular moment in my life.

We can try and accept the will of God with faith. God is speaking to me. Sometimes He whispers in my ear, and sometimes He shouts. He makes it very clear.

We also have to try and help many other people around us to see the will of God in their life, to see that He's speaking to them through the ordinary circumstances of their existence.

Therefore, we can have a great trust in fulfilling the will of God. If I just do what I'm supposed to be doing, fulfill my obligations, complétez tout, then, many great things depend on that.

The fruits will come. “My chosen ones do not work in vain” (Isa. 65:23). We can grow in that trust.

This is the will of God for me, to be here, to be doing this thing, to be doing this particular thing today, and that particular thing tomorrow, or getting through my to-do list, or catching up on those other areas, or fulfilling this aspect of my formation.

We trust that by putting one foot in front of the other in these particular things—and not in other things that might appear more attractive, more suitable to my tastes, or my moods, or my hormones, or my chemistry, or a whole pile of other things—we trust this is what will bring the fruit.

Therefore, we can have a great abandonment, and with that abandonment comes peace and happiness.

Our Father has a phrase in The Way where he says, “Accepting the will of God wholeheartedly is the sure way of finding joy and peace” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, Point 758).

What a treasure, what a secret. We should have set up a stall on Uhuru Avenue, selling the sure way of finding joy and peace, where you might have a big, long crowd of people queuing to find out that secret: “happiness in the Cross. Then we realize that Christ's yoke is sweet, and that his burden is not heavy” (ibid.).

So, we can try to accept that will with humility, as Our Lady and St. Joseph did on the way to Bethlehem, with love, with peace, with joy, with silence.

“If this is your will, Lord, then it's my will also” (cf. J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 762).

No matter what that means: change of plans; go here, go there; do this, do that; stick it out in a difficult situation for a while—I can accept it with hope because we know this is the way.

The fruits will come with patience, with enthusiasm. And that brings great joy, because I know I'm doing the right thing.

I can thank God for His will in our life. Also, for those moments when possibly the hurricane does come, the winds blow, the rains fall, all sorts of things seem to threaten our stability.

Our life can only be built up on Christ Himself, our sole hope, our sure foundation, our rock.

That means that we try to identify our will with His all the time. His will is like a compass needle—like a needle on a compass, which at every moment accurately points the right way to go, and that path is the pathway to our own happiness.

We might end up doing some very good things, but it might not be the will of God for us. It's easy to do good things. What's important is to do the right things.

Hence, the importance of consulting our plans, passing them through the person who has the grace of state. Then we can be sure this is the will of God for us.

We've heard the story before of the Irish lady who gave thousands of euros to Catholic charities in her life, and then she went to heaven. She found her name was not on the Book of Life.

She asked St. Patrick to come out. She wanted to discuss this thing. She thought there'd been some mistake.

She asked him if he could do something for her. So he said, ‘I'll go inside. I’ll talk to the higher-ups and see what I can do.’

So he talked to St. Peter, and after some time, he came back and said to her, ‘Look, I'm sorry, but the best we can do is to give you your money back.’

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21).

It's not enough to do good things. God wants us to do specific things, specific mission, according to our spirit, in the way He wants it done.

And that, in all the little aspects of our spirit: customs, ways of doing things, family traditions, so that at the end of our life we can have the joy of saying that ‘I have tried to fulfill the will of God in everything.’

The successes that we may have had will not gladden us half as much. The sufferings and failures won't matter in the slightest. What will matter is that we have tried to love God's will in preference to our own.

That's where the danger is: our self-love, our self-indulgence, our egoism, my selfishness. What I want, the old person that's there deep inside, we have to try and conquer. We have to put on the new person.

Lord, help me to love your will and to see it and to seek it out.

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34).

“I have a baptism with which to be baptized and how great is my distress until it is over” (Luke 12:50).

“We are going up to Jerusalem and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished” (Luke 18:31).

There was a moment in Our Lord's young life when He gave His parents the slip (Luke 2:41-52). The loss of Jesus in the temple, lost for three days, was not exactly involuntary on His part. Fully conscious of who He was and of His mission, He wanted in some way to begin it. He seeks the will of His heavenly Father.

It was a very painful trial for His parents, but it was also a ray of light revealing the mystery of His life to them. They were also discovering as they went along. It was an episode that they weren't going to forget.

He makes it very clear to them: I am here to fulfill the mission. "I must be about my Father's business” (Luke 2:49).

He makes us see very clearly that God's plans have priority over human plans. God has more right to be obeyed than men (cf. Acts 5:29).

I saw a lady once who had lost her child on the beach as a kid. She had been missing the child for about half an hour and she was almost hysterical.

Here Joseph and Mary are looking for the Child for three days. He allows them to go through this, to emphasize this great message of His Father's business.

Sometimes the fulfillment of the will of God can be difficult, or thankless, or it may hurt. But He may permit these things to turn out the way He wanted, not to turn out the way we had hoped or we had dreamt. He purifies our will.

We might be a bit tempted to discouragement when some heavy blows come, a period of darkness. But all the time, moved by God.

In those moments we can look to Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane, who shows us in those times how to react. We see that He is suffering—the greatest amount of human suffering that has ever been visited upon any human person.

Our Lord doesn't say, ‘Oh great, low-down suffering. This is what I came for.’ He is no masochist. He is “like us in all things but sin” (Heb. 4:15).

He recoils away from this suffering in horror and disgust. "Take this chalice away from me.” The chalice of Christ can be bitter, difficult.

But yet Our Lord immediately supernaturalizes that moment: “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

The triumph of the divine will over our own; the battle that's there—Our Lord invites us to embrace God's will unconditionally while we persevere in prayer. If this is your will, Lord, then it's my will also.

Faith helps us to see things with a higher wisdom. Our Father liked to say, Dios sabe más. God knows more. We don't understand His plans.

There used to be many elderly French missionary priests in Singapore. Some of them were quite elderly, but then there was a Belgian missionary priest who at the age of 55 got cancer and died.

I happened to be in the Little Sisters of the Poor where he passed away, and I met one of the nuns there.

I said: “Isn't it funny that it's the young ones that are dying? The older ones seem to live forever.”

And she said: “You know, God's ways are not our ways” (Isa. 55:8)—a phrase from Scripture. “How inscrutable His judgments, how unsearchable are His ways” (Rom. 11:33).

God knows more. We leave things in His hands. We have little understanding of how His fatherly and gentle care leads us towards Him, of how He is bringing about His plans. There's providence behind everything.

We'll understand a lot of things from heaven. We might will a whole pile of things to happen, and suddenly all of our apostolic works would be super-full and super-engaged, and everybody in the whole of society would suddenly realize how great the spirit of Opus Dei is, and the secret to so many things, and the Catholic Church would certainly resurrect itself in the world, and all the laws of all countries would suddenly reflect God's plans, and a whole pile of other things, the evangelization of culture.

Maybe we see the opposite happening. We see that happening very slowly. This has happened in other moments of history.

But maybe this isn't the moment God wants those things. He wants us to work towards them. That's the goal.

He doesn't want us to see them actually happening. But what He does want is our personal holiness, our personal apostolate, our use of the means, our trust, our abandonment, our faith that His fatherly providence is working itself out, so that we find Him in everything.

Then we find peace and serenity of soul, because we know that “God works for the good for those who love him.” Omnia in bonum (Rom. 8:28).

It's not just some things that work out for the good, but all things. The accomplishment of God's will is that pathway to tranquility and peace.

In all the means of formation, He wants us to transmit this to so many other people, so that they can find tranquility and peace in the moments of the Cross that may come in their life, or when the hurricanes blow in their family, or in their marriage, or in their professional life, or in their health, or in their finances—that they also find that tranquility and peace in the humble acceptance of the will of God.

One of the principal purposes of our prayer then is to help us to identify ourselves entirely with His divine will.

In a sense, that's what it should be, what the purpose is of the Agony in the Garden. “Our Lord withdrew from them about a stone's throw. Then kneeling down, he began to pray” (Luke 22:41).

It's there He identifies His will with the Divine Will. And the first word of that phrase is the most important: “Father, let this chalice pass from me” (Luke 22:42).

There's no contradiction between the fact that God is His loving, heavenly Father, and the fact that He's about to be visited with the greatest amount of human suffering that anybody ever experienced. But through this the fruit will come.

“If you, even as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father bring good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:11).

How much more? We can trust and hope and live for that ‘more.’ Because God knows more.

We know the fruits will come, that great things will change. God wants our will united to His.

Even when at times His plans seem to have nothing but disaster, to try and see things from that supernatural perspective.

Every so often God allows certain disasters from a human perspective in the world: World Trade Centers that collapse, earthquakes, tsunamis, plane crashes.

But all those have their purpose, to teach us the fleeting nature of this life, of always being prepared, or that we're called to the eternal wedding feast.

The day and the hour of how it comes—it's not up to us. There are great spiritual lessons through all of these things.

We know that if we ask Him for bread, He will not give us a stone (Matt. 7:9). He's a Father, a loving Father, infinitely good.

He may not give us everything that we ask for, but we know He gives us greater things.

When Lazarus died, Martha of Bethany said to Our Lord: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21).

Jesus didn't cure him, His great friend. That's what they wanted. But He did something better: He brought him back to life (John 11:41-45).

He is wisdom itself. We are the ignorant ones. What we may see in our impatience and in an incomplete manner, God sees in its totality.

That's why also we have to trust the things that are said to us that come from the organs of government, with the grace of the Holy Spirit. We have the bigger picture.

The Holy Spirit gently leads us in the right direction.

Our challenge is to want the will of God in everything, to accept it with joy, with love, no matter how difficult or incomprehensible.

“That is a manifestation of the trust of the child and his Father. The Father's goodness teaches us to be fully human, to discover the grandeur of our divine filiation” (Georges Chevrot, In Secret).

I am a child of God, and therefore nothing bad can happen to me. I have to focus more on Him and less on myself, conquer any self-centered tendencies.

“Thy will be done” (Luke 22:42; Matt. 6:10).

Lord, thank you for your will in my life, for all the times when you've manifested it to me. You helped me to do this or do that, or make this decision or that decision, or choose this particular pathway from a number of choices.

You've led me to where I am, to follow my vocation, to find truth, beauty, and love in the tabernacle, in my vocation, in the spirit of the Work.

I want to go forward along this pathway, the pathway to holiness, purifying my will.

Our Lord teaches us how to adapt our will to the will of God; to see His will as our food (John 4:34). I want to do it above everything.

I see that this is your will, even though it costs me an effort, or I have to change my plans, or all sorts of things, but that's what I want, and to be faithful to that will, even in the smallest details.

“I have not come to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

We tell Our Lord: I do not want what my senses, or maybe my intelligence, prompt me to desire, even if they yearn for good things. I want what you want, whatever it may cost.

If we find that difficult, we go to the tabernacle. We find strength there. We love the will of God, whatever happens.

Often that will is in the simplest, most ordinary things, daily circumstances: the gradual weakening or aging of our body, that, maybe, reminds us from time to time that we're not twenty-one; or the noble dreams that we may have had‑that don't quite work out as we thought.

We try to accept our own limitations. I can't manage this or that. Or the lifelong struggle to grow in virtue, that maybe, costs a little bit. Or the people that God wants me to work with, or this particular machine, or that particular department.

The simplest, ordinary thing, this is the will of God, here and now. To answer this person nicely, to do this little favor, to smoothen out the ordinary things of every day—this is what I'm here for.

We’re told in The Way of the Cross: “You said to me: ‘Father, I am having a very rough time.’ In answer, I whispered in your ear: Take upon your shoulders a small part of that cross, just a tiny part. And if you can't manage that...then leave it entirely on the strong shoulders of Christ.

“And from this moment on, repeat with me: My Lord and my God, into your hands I abandon the past and the present and the future, what is small and what is great, what amounts to a little and what amounts to a lot, things temporal and things eternal. Then, don't worry anymore” (J. Escrivá, The Way of the Cross, Seventh Station).

It can be comforting to know that we're called to be a co-Redeemer (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 374), to stand beside the Cross, accept this thing that's difficult to accept.

Our Lord said to the apostles: “Are you able to drink of the cup of which I'm about to drink?” (Matt. 20:22). We are able.

I may not be able with my own personal strength and efforts, but with your help I can. “I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” Omnia possum (Phil. 4:13).

The Lord's chalice may be a bitter chalice, but it turns into a chalice of blessings for all men. The cup is overflowing with beauty, with joy.

We're told in The Way that the holiness we must aspire to consists in identifying our way with Christ’s.

“This is the key to open the door and enter the kingdom of heaven. He who does the will of my Father…he shall enter!” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 754).

We could try to make little acts of identification of our will with God's will. Getting used to making acts of identification with God's will in the important and in the less important circumstances of each day will produce abundant fruits in our soul.

St. Josemaría says in The Way, “Jesus, whatever you ‘want’, I love!” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 773).

We turn to Our Lady, teacher of unlimited self-giving: “Be it done unto me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

She came to fulfill the will of God in everything—in Bethlehem, in Egypt, in Nazareth, beside the Cross, allowing the “sword to pierce her heart” (cf. Luke 2:35).

Mary, help us to see more clearly what the will of God is in all the little things of each day, and to follow it as faithfully as you did.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

GD