Unhappy Man That I Am
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, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
St. Paul says to the Romans, “Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ Our Lord” (Rom. 7:24–25).
God’s desire with regard to us is that we should unite ourselves to him. This desire on his part is prompted by and springs from his infinite goodness towards us. It is not for any advantage that is to come to him, but solely for the good it is to bring to us that he desires this union.
He has created us to make us happy. In our entering into and sharing the riches of his infinite life is our happiness to be found.
The sole mode by which this is possible for us is that, severing all spiritual bonds that bind our souls to ourselves or to creatures, we should mingle our thoughts and affections with the thoughts and affections of God, and so become one spirit with him, as a friend becomes one spirit with friend.
St. Paul also says to the Corinthians, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (1 Cor. 6:17).
This is what is meant by our union with God. In this consists for us true life and true happiness. For where it exists, God shares with the soul the treasures of his own infinite being.
It is for this reason, and this alone, that God desires that we should become one with him, and imposes on us the obligation of doing so.
No parent on earth so eagerly and ardently plans for the good and the well-being of their child as God plans for the good of each soul.
The only thing that can frustrate this design on the part of God is our refusal to cooperate with him.
That he cannot infallibly effect his purposes where we are concerned is due to the very perfection of the nature of the life with which he has endowed us.
That life is the life of a free being. Its highest prerogative is the exercise of freedom of choice between good and evil, between the greater and the lesser good.
God submits himself to the essential conditions that arise from the creative act by which free beings come into existence. To the very notion of a free creature it belongs that the masterpiece of God’s power, a free being, has this in its power: to embrace or reject the high destiny that God has prepared for it.
The book of Ecclesiasticus says, “God made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel” (Sir. 15:14).
By the very law of his creation, and in virtue of the perfection given by the creative act, the satisfaction of God’s desire to see his creatures infinitely happy, and the successful issue of the plans he forms to secure that happiness, are contingent on the created will lending itself or not lending itself to the designs of the Creator in its regard.
He who created us without our consent cannot, because of the nature of the free will with which he has created us, save us without our consent.
The creature, if it is to return to the source from which it comes, must return freely. God desires that return because of the love he bears us, seeing in it our only good.
He furnishes us with every help to overcome the obstacles that lie in our way. He employs all his attractiveness to win us, all his art to persuade us to engage in the enterprise, and all his loving kindness and prevision in aiding our efforts. But all this in such a way as not to cause the least prejudice to the perfect voluntariness of the creature’s activity.
He desires our intimacy and affection. He supplies all that is needed to effect in our souls the transformation which makes union and intimacy with him possible. But he will never force our surrender to him.
God is divinely respectful of the freedom with which he has endowed us, for he must respect the work of his own hands. He will do nothing that will impair or restrict in the least degree the power of free choice he has given to angels and to men. For were he to make us free, and then act in such a way as to exercise constraint on that freedom, he would be open to the charge of inconstancy, of doing and then undoing, of first giving and then taking away, either wholly or in part.
That something which is created, that something which is obviously dependent on its maker, not only for its existence but for every instant of that existence, should yet be free and capable of acting or not acting in accordance with the will of its divine artist, this is an astonishing mystery.
That the same being should be absolutely dependent, and yet enjoy an extraordinary independence in respect of that very being on whom it depends, is the supreme marvel in creation.
The reconciliation of this dependence and this independence inherent to the same being at the same time is an insoluble problem for the human reason. But what God does, he does with a sovereign perfection and generosity.
Having decided to create man free, man would be free with the full perfection denoted by this term. He would be free not only with regard to the usage of creation, not only in his dealings with his fellow men, but even in his relations with his Creator.
The creature that is not free has no power to resist or withdraw itself from the influence by which it is drawn towards its final end. It gravitates with ineluctable necessity to that end. In its creation, it remains bound to God by chains which cannot be sundered.
It is not so with rational or intellectual beings. Even though they remain, when created, in an absolute dependence on the Creator, as do irrational and inanimate creatures, yet in a certain sense, by the very act of their creation, they are set as it were at a distance from God, outside the range of that influence within which things are drawn irresistibly towards him.
Nevertheless, even though they are thus removed, there remains imposed on them, since God can assign no other term to the movement of his creatures than himself, the necessity of returning to that principle from which they came. This is the condition of their attaining to that perfection, to their reality, to their happiness.
Man’s life work is voluntarily to make that return journey from his place in creation back to his Creator. If he does not do it freely, it will not be done at all.
On one side of that great abyss, lying between the creature and the Creator, stands man. And on the other, God, calling, inviting, persuading, but not coercing man to come to him.
As a mother with encouraging smile and outstretched hands coaxes the child who is just learning to walk to essay its hesitating, uncertain, and wavering steps across the space that separates them, so God stands at the term of life, ready to receive into loving arms the soul after the perilous passage has been completed, in docility to the divine directions.
God at the start of our responsible existence sets us at a distance from himself, and then caressingly he provokes us to make our feeble attempts to return to him, striving to walk with faltering and unsteady steps as children in the way of holiness. But just as the mother does not herself walk for her child, so God does not exempt us from our own feeble efforts to obtain our objective.
Much as he longs to see us safe in his arms, he will never use his omnipotence to crush in us the power we have to elect either to come or to stay.
His dealings with us are characterized by extreme delicacy and the utmost regard for the prerogatives with which he has endowed us. So conscious are we of the possession of this freedom of our will that we easily fall into the error of thinking that it lies wholly and entirely with ourselves to attain the end for which we have been created.
Many think that they have only to will to be virtuous in order to become so, and believe that the good will by which one desires virtue and accomplishes justice comes from oneself without any outside help.
There is in us very commonly a practical ignorance of the fact that there is in our will, in consequence of sin, both the sin of nature and personal sin, a bias towards evil which we are powerless to correct of ourselves.
The correction of this defect, which if it remains presents an insuperable obstacle to our union with God, is effected by grace and grace alone.
The fatal wound in our will can be cured only by God. In this matter we are ourselves powerless. The good will, which means the will pliable to the action of good, is not something that is in our power to create.
Though all are aware that it is impossible to perform an act meritorious of the beatific vision unless by divine grace, there are few that realize that actual grace is needed to make our souls assent to the reception of this gift of God.
All know that our fallen nature is utterly powerless without grace to do anything whatsoever that will direct it towards its supernatural end. All know that there is incompatibility between the life of grace and the life of fallen nature. But few realize that there is not only incompatibility but positive opposition between grace and nature.
Yet the Apostle warns us when he speaks to the Romans, “For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will, but the evil which I hate, that I do. For to will is present with me, but to accomplish that which is good, I find not” (Rom. 7:15, 18).
And again he says, lest we might think the will to be good was wholly in our power, speaking to the Philippians, “For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will” (Phil. 2:13).
Without grace we cannot do the good we will to do, nor can we will to do the good we ought to do in order to save our souls.
The emphasis that we lay upon our freedom should not hide from us our utter dependence on grace throughout the entire work of our sanctification.
Actual grace is the help that God extends to us in order that we may be able to traverse the wide space that separates us from him.
We are far more helpless to make those steps by which we are to find our way to his arms than is the feeblest child that for the first time tries to walk unaided. It can do a little by itself. We can do nothing. We need God’s grace to stir us up to try the journey. We need the same divine assistance to support each tottering step we make, and it is required even at the end in order that we may successfully make the final effort which places us safe in the arms of God our Father.
If our native weakness were not sustained by actual grace at each separate stage of that journey, our forces would be utterly unequal to the task of bringing us to our goal. And yet we are free in all this. Divine grace does not constrain our will, but gently and without doing violence to its nature, draws it towards the divine being. We are told in St. John, “No man can come to me, except the Father draw him” (John 6:44).
So clear is it to our consciousness that in every deliberate act, even of a supernatural kind, we enjoy a perfect freedom to do or not to do, to choose one course or another, that we cannot realize the part played by grace in the good acts we perform.
The freedom we enjoy in our acts so imposes itself on our consciousness that we often assign to the unaided forces of nature a determination which in reality would never have been made by us without the aid of grace.
God is incredibly kind and delicate in all his dealings with his creatures. The weaker they are, the more considerate he is towards them. Ordinarily speaking, the more imperfect we are, the more unskilled in spiritual matters, the less perception we have of our constant need of grace for the good we are able to effect. God seems to hide his action from the sinner, lest the latter, realizing too clearly his powerlessness for any good, should become disheartened and cease to make those feeble efforts which God demands as the condition for his divine help.
He allows the weak Christian, who must acknowledge by his faith that no act conducive to salvation can be elicited without the help of grace, still in practice to think that many of the steps taken in the conversion from evil to good have been made by the exercise of the sinner’s unaided will.
A certain amount of confidence in the power of one’s own resolution to be effective of good can be helpful to one who is as yet unpracticed and unskilled in supernatural matters.
But after an initiation into the interior life, things undergo a great change. It still remains difficult to detect the actual play of grace upon our acts, and there still remains with us a certain amount of self-reliance and confidence in our own powers, as well as a kind of practical belief that we are able, by a resolute discipline of our will and by the practice of asceticism, to attain a certain increase of righteousness. But we have a clearer perception of the necessity of the help of grace for our real progress in union with God.
Ascetical practices and mortification are always useful. They should in fact never be left aside. But the belief that we ourselves, by the strengthening of will that they impart, can discipline ourselves into holiness, can prove a real obstacle to growth in the supernatural life. For this growth, we need the realization of our complete dependence on God for the least degree of supernatural good, and our utter powerlessness to do the least thing towards our own perfection without the aid of his grace.
God, for our own good, at a certain stage of the spiritual life, brings home to us in a most convincing manner the fact that the workings of his grace are intimately interwoven with the very least of our deliberate efforts to do good or to avoid evil.
After we have spent many years, perhaps, in the practice of virtue, and in constant as well as earnest aspirations after that purity of heart which makes union with God possible, we are allowed to find ourselves a prey to the miseries of our own perverse nature that we had believed transformed, without the power to emancipate ourselves from these miseries, and finally without the power to conquer or even resist the most ordinary temptations.
It is only in the realization of this utter helplessness that we begin to see how much God had been with us during our whole spiritual career, and how close to us he had been when we were utterly unconscious of his presence, and believed that we were doing and achieving things in the strength of the virtues that we persuaded ourselves we had acquired.
This discovery of the weakness and proneness to sin that remains in us, even after many years spent in close and intimate relations with God, should not discourage us or cast us down. Our Lord permits us to enter into this knowledge in view of our sanctification.
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, St. 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.
EW
Based on The Voice of a Priest, Sermon Five, by Edward Leen, C.S.Sp., edited by Bernard J. Kelly, C.S.Sp. (Sheed & Ward, 1946).