2009

On Vox: God has a will for each of us special?

Michel Rondet SI

place in these terms, the question we created some embarrassment. There are days when we would like to refer to a particular will of God, which is our vocation. As would be reassuring and comforting during the hours of doubt and difficulty! Knowing that this is part of provided a plan of God from all eternity, in which every element of our lives, happy or sad it may be, has its place and its meaning!

But at the same time protesting something within us, God then we would be filled before a program established outside of us, without even knowing for sure give us the means? As if words have meaning and if you wanted to talk then God's will, which would not have lost the divine on our freedom! And what distress also would have for us when it comes to choosing means any error, any delay would be dramatic. Running parallel to God's mind, even inadvertently placing ourselves outside of his project, we lost everything. This is all the more easily because we know that God's ways are not our ways, and each day we realize how difficult and sometimes risky want to discern God's will that we call God has placed us at the crossroads, opposite directions, only one of which would be good, without giving us the means to recognize it with certainty, is part of the image of a God wicked and can not in any way express the attitude of the God who came to the Alliance save one who was lost.

However we know that this same God is the one who calls us with our name and our meeting with him through a particular path for us. From Abraham to Peter, salvation history is replete with examples of men called to a new life for a specific mission, which often finds its symbol in the name change: from now on you will be called Abraham, Israel, Peter. The mission of Moses to Jeremiah and Paul, seem to correspond exactly to a particular will of God, to mark their unique way of life that leads to loneliness. Destini or exceptional examples of what we are all called to live?

1. A question of misplaced

Which priest, as an educator, having to help young people to choose a direction in life, you are not undefeated one day in boys and girls came to tell him with hope and fear: "I must make a choice, I want to do God's will and I would not be wrong, would be serious, but I do not know what God expects of me, and then I came to her so that she give me the means to know with any certainty. "

Answering a question posed in these terms is impossible, at least pretend to do so would be presumptuous. Who is able to act in such harmony with God's will? Discernment, which say the least, does not reveal, as such, the plan of God upon us, we have to recognize it by our desires and our expectations that it can appeal to the Spirit of Christ!

The only answer we can give to the question just referred to is to tell the boy or girl: "The will of God is not, first you choose this or that but you make good use of it, that you choose yourself, in terms of a fair reflection, devoid of egoism as the fear, the most fruitful way, most glad to make your life. In view of what you are, your past, your history, the meetings that you did, you can have the perception that the needs of the Church and the world, which can give a personal response to the calls that you caught in the Bible? What God expects from you is that you choose this way or that He would be provided for you all eternity; today is that you invent your response to his presence and his call, "

It is no longer, then, to discover and execute a predetermined program, but to give birth to a loyalty. Experience shows that it is a fairly radical change of perspective, which often takes time.

2. A conversion in depth

There is a part of ourselves that is hard to come off somewhat perverse image of God, often inherited from the deism that has marked Western culture. Here we find an omnipotent God, who sees everything, knows everything, before which human history unfolds as a show without surprise, and that expected that we occupy our place of extras where he has planned from all eternity.

Nobody will express so brutally, but there is no need to find Scrape very image of God in the background of some of our ways of understanding the will of God, His providence

... Certainly, there is a God's plan and the letters of Paul, the prologue of the Gospel of John have tried to describe it: "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love, destined to be his sons through Jesus Christ "(Ephesians 1:4-5). "But to have , he gave power to become children of God "(Jn 1:12).

This plan of God is not a determination of any divine was totally free, is a saving plan that expresses the deepest being of God's love that gives and communicates. It is the expression of intimate communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that opens to welcome otherness in his love. This design encompasses the entire history of alliance and all of humanity, but because it is the will of alliance, a desire for communion, which in turn can not free people.

Therefore, it is true that there is a desire on the part of God reaches each of us personally. If God reveals Himself through His Word, His Word, this is just to be understood by everyone. If we are called to be sons in the Son, what He expects of us is that we express in a word going to be reunited with his. This word, He expects all of us.

The revelation of his love may certainly bring it into being in us is for us to pronounce it without it there is never imposed. In other words, you could still say that creating us in his image God calls each of us to give this picture its special resemblance. As the image of the Father gave Jesus a particular human face, a focus only to his word, each of us is called to reflect in his life, the sanctity of the Father.

The God before whom we are not, therefore, that computer is amazingly powerful, able to plan and store in its memory billions of individual destinies and that we should examine with fear and trembling about our future. It is love that has taken the risk of calling us to life, the similarity and difference, to offer the alliance and communion. It is this face of God to repent, if we put ourselves in truth, the sight of God's will we then recognize him not as a dictate or a fatality, but as a call to a common creation.

3. To create a

The answer we give to God is not registered anywhere, neither in the book of life, nor in the heart of God, if not as an expectation and a hope. The hope that God still sees and to which we give form and face. It is the size and the risk of our lives to be called to inspire the joy of God through the quality and generosity of our response.

The choices we make are therefore of creation from nothing. We will prepare materials that are the human condition: our temperament and our history. We can not everything, but we lay face to give meaning and what would be nothing but a destiny. In this effort of personal creation in response to the call of God, the Spirit comes to us, not as an external force that is imposed on us, but as an energy inner aroused in us from accepting the word of God and the participation the life of the Church.

The Gospel there will dictate the choice, but will open new horizons to our desire: "It was said ... I tell you ... Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness" (Mt 5.26; 6.33) "may be also where I am you ... the will of my Father who is to bear fruit, fruit that will last ... "(Jn 14.3, 15.16). The Gospel does not tell us you have to do, but we will call in all things to the perfection of charity: "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect ... love one another as I have loved you ... he who does not forgive his brother with all my heart ..." (Mt 5:48, Jn 15.12, Mt 18.35). The Church may also turn to the appeals ... ministries, the consecrated life, to this or that form of service, but whatever your needs, it does not bind anybody in a particular way without making sure of his free consent. To help us in our response, it connects us to a huge crowd of witnesses in which we learn to recognize the brothers. Their lives, their choices are there before us, as so many calls, not to imitate, but to follow them. Francis of Assisi, Ignatius, Teresa ... are unique and inimitable, but their lives are as many invitations for us to invent ourselves the answer will come to glorify God, and if we try to recover what they have lived, we see that there is no less predictable and less programmed in their lives.

They sought God's will with all their hearts, had a very vivid consciousness of being biased, preceded by God's love, a love that never fail to recognize the action of grace.

In their choice, they have groping, hesitating, sometimes doubted, finally, to entrust to the Spirit who guided them to the Kingdom. They were able to see the grace in the events as varied as in the proof of God's glory in happened. The continuity and consistency that we admire in their lives are revealed only in retrospect, once it has been embraced in a single glance a road traveled mostly groping.

Much more than a strict programming, what characterizes the lives of saints is the spiritual quality of their reaction before any event, it was also the most unexpected. Was not always understood the phrase of Pascal: "Events are the teachers that God gives us to help to serve. " Do not let us make no more than say what you mean. Events do not have a framework in which God holds us, not events to make holy. They are the materials that are given to us to build our response. The answer will bear the mark of the material used, but still more than an architect who we are and who is responsible. You can not do everything with everything, but you can always make a life work. Love can bring out the worst in the sanctity of human contexts: the testimony of those who have dedicated their lives to the friendship of the marginalized, the dispossessed, the excluded, it never ceases to remind us.

We wonder whether there of a particular will of God for all of us. The Church, making us live the communion of saints, reminds us that it would be more accurate to speak of a personal response from each of us the desire of God

4. For dialogue between the two freedoms

The love of God goes before us, we end up not ever become aware of and give thanks. But as St. Paul reminds us that love "emptied himself" (Phil. 2:7) in front of our freedom, he took forever for us the figure of a servant. That is, calling us to communion, God has no other desire than to dedicate our freedom, to offer a horizon that expands to infinity "Abide in me and I in you ... This I have told you that my joy may be in you and my joy may be full" (Jn 15,4.11). If God has a dream about us, is first to see it bear fruit: "You did not choose me, but I chose you and I that you should go and bear fruit, fruit that will last" (Jn 15:16) .

We can not emphasize more the priority of God's desire and at the same time his profound wish, to see us fully assume our freedom as love inspires love, freedom alive the freedom of the will of God that awakens 'man.

Similarly, in order to appreciate the quality of my spiritual response to God, we should read from the perspective of my own freedom. Is it a figment of my freedom deep, really taking a life that expresses itself? I acknowledge that my decision is linked to the will of God, if I may say that it makes me more free, that is, if introduced into my life meaning and coherence, if he unifies my past in a future opening. We, at this point, we touch one of the most profound of spiritual decision. It came to unify what is in my past was nothing but a series of successive touches. It comes to my memory card into the bonds that had not yet received, to introduce the discontinuity apparent my moments of grace and my weaknesses a new continuity. And at the same time, it opens to my future: the past makes it look so reunified new possibilities. What would have seemed impossible or meaningless now becomes natural. When, on his return from Jerusalem, Ignatius makes the decision to go to school, that choice unifies all past moments of spiritual grace around a point recognized as fundamental: the desire to help souls. It opens up a future that Ignatius does not even feel, but going to join in the logic of this choice: the founding of the Society of Jesus

He can truly say that this foundation is entirely work of God, whose love has preceded and guided through the stages of his life. We, on our part, we can say that is the work of Ignatius, his generosity, his loyalty, his lucidity: it bears the mark of his freedom. We must therefore speak of a desire for God? We feel good that any such alternative ignores the profound truth: that a meeting, a communion between the two freedoms that are found in a common task.

5. For the good of the whole body

speak of a particular will of God be upon us requires clarification. In the Bible, every vocation is individualized: men, a people. But Paul reminds us that all grace is given to the body. If you want to recall the main stages in the history of salvation, you will see that the names: Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, Jesus of proper names with special destiny, but none of them can understand himself without reference to its place in common history. The Saints are only in the Communion of Saints, the path of God's people question me about my life is always at my place within the Body of Christ. No one that I will be assigned, but what I can, I wish to occupy. State that I will be for the good of the whole body? There, the answer still belongs to me, and God expects from me, new, and generous, to rejoice in my solidarity and welcomed my freedom.

We will be subject to a particular part of God? We must discern calls Dionella our lives, and it would be foolish to say that there are none. God never ceases to create for ourselves through the Word, we exist only in this word, which now calls us to life. It's up to us to recognize the many attributes that translate this word creative as a child pays attention to words that call to come out of himself. It is often in an attempt to reinterpret our lives under the gaze of God, we become susceptible to appeals to us. Rather than a clear desire, expressed in a rule of life, these calls will reveal God's desire, its stock and its hope to see us make up little by little our response. We can therefore accept without hesitation the anxiety, failures and ambiguities of our choices. In the words of Emmanuel Mounier: "God is big enough to make a vocation even of our mistakes." There are many mansions in the house of the Father, God expects us to build up our there. He works with us.

Originally posted on catholica.vox.com