Where Do We Draw the Line with God?

This was the theme that our priest returned to again and again as he talked about the story of Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain, thinking that God would have him slay his son as a sacrifice. Neither Abraham nor Isaac protested or put up any opposition to God's orders. They exhibited completely willingness and trust in God no matter how terrible and abhorrent his plans seemed.

This made me think of Mary's "yes" to God, her similar complete willingness and trust.

I also thought of what I had read that morning in Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread His coming in proportion as we are identified with this exterior self and attached to it. But when we understand the dialectic of life and death we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality.

The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a supernatural desire. For how can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant His liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in the desire for the things that I hate, and I have hardened my heart against true love. I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me. I must learn to "leave myself in order to find myself by yielding to the love of God. If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of His life that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest.

I thought of a couple of occasions when I have seen people who knew what was right but who so clearly desired to do what they wanted instead. How they went from friend to friend asking for an opinion. When it never was the answer they wanted, these seekers having honest friends, they kept searching almost frantically for someone who would affirm their wishes instead of the larger truth. In each case, their friends' hearts ached for them during the search.

Then I thought of myself. How easy it is to identify when someone else is turning from obedience. Yet, as I had just been telling Tom that morning, I had been feeling nudges from many sources to begin attending daily Mass. No one was saying that most deadly of arguments to me, "It's so wonderful. So inspirational." I'd heard that before. It merely left me thinking I didn't feel that "call."

No, the comments that nudged would always be about something else entirely. I can't really recall they were now, for the most part (except for yours, Rita, that one I remember). To get my attention to that level, however, they had been coming for some time and from many sources. Even at a party on Saturday when a friend was telling of her own Lenten addition of Wednesday morning Mass, my antennae perked up. That "I ought to ..." feeling was there.

I could not even argue that it would disrupt my morning schedule. I would merely have to put aside my own activities for an hour before getting to work ... and I can't even tell you what activities would be disrupted, that is how unimportant they are.

I was beginning to feel annoyed and hunted. Until I realized during that homily just where I was drawing the line. At giving God one hour in the morning. An hour which He fully is intending for my own joy and good and benefit ... and freedom. If I am reading the "nudges" aright.

In response, here I was kicking and screaming. Not trusting and wondering and looking forward to what might come that I cannot possibly foresee.

It was a shaming moment.

But afterward, when I had apologized and said a wholehearted, "Yes" ... I had complete peace. No annoyance over the schedule, over the daily obligation. Simply peace. That is the clearest sign of all.

My only mulling over then was wondering what time, if some of the daily Masses were held at the lower school instead of the church and so on. At which point I spared my guardian angel a thought. He had just been waiting, evidently, to whack me on the head and say, "Just go, knucklehead! Don't sweat the details."

Got it.

I went home afterwards and finished reading the essay.

My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom--still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: "Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.

By consenting to His will with joy and doing it with gladness I have His love in my heart, because my will is now the same as His love and I am on the way to becoming what He is, Who is Love. And by accepting all things from Him I receive His joy into my soul, not because things are what they are but because God is Who He is, and His love has willed my joy in them all.

Indeed.

And if not joy yet, certainly peace.

No measurable good may come of daily Mass attendance that I will ever be able to report (though I don't really believe that). However, even if the sole good comes from my realization of my stubborn struggle and my change of heart to a willing "yes" ... then that is enough.

Update: Ironically, this morning at my first daily Mass I realized that this actually may be God's way of economically answering my own prayers and using them for something which I had not intended. I'd been having so much trouble getting my time use under control that I'd been praying for help with focusing. Mass waiteth for no man (to paraphrase that famous saying). Except for the priest, one supposes. I've gotta hustle and focus to get there on time. Hoist on my own petard!