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Discerning God’s Will

How do we know God’s plan for our lives,
The particular pathway that He has prepared for us to follow,
The great purpose for which we are created,
The noble vocation bought for us by the blood of Christ?
The Lord implicated Himself in our Pilgrim plight,
And has already gone before us to our heavenly homeland,
If we search His heart, we will find every gift and virtue needed
To ascend with Him to the Father’s glory:

Hope raises our eyes to this Holy Mountain.
Prayer unlocks this narrow gate hidden in our heart.
Wisdom lays open its wondrous horizons.
Devotion sets us across its threshold.
Faith is our guide on this mysterious pathway.
Understanding follows its unwavering course.
Knowledge frees from every distraction.
Counsel finds the cairns when the trail is difficult to discern.
Fortitude fights its foes and endures its painful sorrows.
Holy fear prevents us from looking back.
Love moves each footstep forward.

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How Do We Know God’s Will?

Many people after discovering the faith soon realize that it is sometimes difficult to discern God’s will in a given situation.  Most people think that knowing God’s will is impossible.  After all, He gave us our natural capacity to reason and He has revealed Himself to us – so the rest is up to us.  There is some truth to this, especially at the beginning of the spiritual life.  But anyone who tries to make progress in our pilgrimage of faith this way is soon discouraged.  Following Christ often requires us to act in ways far beyond what common sense would dictate.  This is why St. Paul urges, “calling to mind the mercy of God, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, your spiritual worship.  Do not conform yourselves to this age, but live a transformed life by the renewal of your minds – so that you may discern what is God’s will — what is good, pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:1-2).
As long as we try to live like everybody else, as long as we think like everyone else, our ability to know God’s will is severely impeded.   The mercy of God reveal by Christ crucified gives us a different standard.  The pathway to knowing the will of God is found in loving imitation of the Lord who laid down his life for his friends.  God’s will is found in the Cross.  
We can find the Cross first of all through loving sacrifice no matter how small or insignificant or hidden from the world.  In fact, the more hidden the better.  In the old days, this was called “offering it up.”  Whatever is the least desired, least comfortable, least understood – God’s will is hidden there waiting to be discovered.    Whenever we renounce anything out of love and devotion to the Lord, whenever we bear a trial for his glory, whenever we offer up our internal pain and continue out of faithfulness to Him – this action opens up space in our hearts and minds, space for God’s will to flow into our will.  Paradoxically, this never overthrows our freedom but expands it, liberating us from selfishness and anything else that prevents us from loving to the full.
The Cross of Christ is also found whenever we are moved to do something beautiful for God.  It was in her effort to do something beautiful for God that Teresa of Calcutta heard the Lord call her to be his light.  She discovered in her efforts to do something beautiful for God new facets of His Holy Will that would have otherwise remained hidden.   John of the Cross lived by this same wisdom and marveled at the immense horizon of love and freedom God’s will contains.  He came to counsel those who were seeking the Will of God, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.” 
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That Loving Knowledge

Although the Almighty is beyond the power of human understanding to grasp, Christians believe that knowing God’s Will is possible because Jesus, in his humanity offered for our sakes, has given us real access to God.

The kind of knowledge the Risen Lord gives us is different than the merely factual kind of knowing. Such factual knowledge is all about simply knowing what to do – how to make or fix something. There is nothing to be gained in approaching the Mystery of the Living God like a service manual.

Knowing God and his Holy Will is, instead, deeply personal. In this loving knowledge, St. John of the Cross explains, love (not naked reasoning) leads us forward into the Divine Mystery. What the intellect understands follows behind our love for the One who discloses Himself. The loving will knows the Loving Will of God and a union of wills, each given to the other, becomes possible. This love is a friendship love – it sees the goodness and beauty of God because it has loved Him and been loved by Him first. St. Paul calls this the Wisdom of God (see 1 Cor. 6-13). Some theologians call this experimental or experiential knowledge of God. There really is not words to describe this kind of knowledge – yet those who know the Lord in this way really have something to say, something the world needs to hear, something we need in our lives.

With this kind of loving knowledge, a joy, peace and a dynamic self-possession grows in the heart. Every time someone acts in accord with this loving knowledge of God, these fruits increase -sometimes exponentially. This fruit, which St. Paul enumerates in his letter to the Galatians, is produced by the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:22). When we choose to act in accord with the loving knowledge the Lord shares with us, it frees the Holy Spirit to be fruitful in our hearts.

It is possible to act against this knowledge, to act as if we were ignorant of God. St. Paul warns against living with our minds conformed to this age or like those whose minds are darkened (Rom 12:2, Eph. 4:18). It is possible for those who believe in Christ to choose to live in the flesh – to allow the unconscious hidden drives of our nature to make our decisions for us, not only in big things, but especially in the little things we think no one knows and no one will be hurt by. This living in intentional ignorance is what keeps us immature spiritually – acting against what we know in our hearts.

There is no reason for discouragement if we suddenly realize that most of our lives we have chosen to live in ignorance. Teresa of Avila lived like this until she was almost forty years old. The Lord however would not let her continue – and when she was off her guard, He pierced her to the heart with His Love. Just as He touched her to the core, He can touch any one of us – it is something worth asking for, something worth enduring every kind of trial to obtain.

So the spiritual life really begins when we take up the struggle to make room in our lives for the loving knowledge of God that only Jesus gives. This is why Christians must make silent prayer a priority in their lives. It is a knowledge that comes from the Cross and doing all we can to gain this knowledge is worth it.

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Listening for the Voice of God

Oftentimes someone will question what God’s will is and how to go about listening to God.  God has chosen to speak through humanity – this is the meaning of the incarnation.  God reveals himself in a human way.  This continues in the Body of Christ.  The Church is where Christ continues to speak to each of us: through the teaching handed on to us, the Bible, the Liturgy, Sacraments and in our relating to one another in his Body.   But to hear his voice, we must learn to listen.  How do we really listen?  St. Benedict precieved the connection between obedience and listening – which are related words in Latin.  Yet to really obey, to really listen, we must go pass the words of a command we think we understand and attend with our whole being to everything being communicated.  This is especially true when we are attending to the Lord in our neighbor (who could be as much a complete stranger as spouse, child, parent or friend).  Anthony Bloom, in Meditations in his reflection on the Pharisee and the Publican sheds some light.

“How different Christ’s way is to our own horrible gift of seeing through layers of transparency, of translucence and of light, the equivocal twilight of human imperfection or the darkness of a still unenelightened but rich internal chaos.  WE are not content to judge actions without giving people the benefit of the doubt; we question their very motives, suspect their intentions, instead of ‘believing all things, hoping all things.’

“We must act ruthlessly against this tendency we have to judge everything from the viewpoint of our little self.  The first step on the way into the Kingdom is defined by Christ as ‘deny thyself.’  We could put it in harsher terms: when we see that once again, instead of seeing or hearing somone, we are wrapped up in ourselves, we must round this obstrusive ‘I’ and cry out in anger:’Get behind me, Satan.  You think not of the things of God.  Out of my way, I am tired of seeing your face!'”

Those who in beginning to pray learn to listen to God in their neighbor by renouncing the propensity to judge from the view point of ‘self” discover God speaking through the hearts of all those He has entrusted to us.  It is a matter of surrendering our pride and embracing Christ’s own humility.  He is the One who yearns to speak to our hearts – He is also the One who delights in listening for our voice.  In this humble listening, we hear the resurrected voice of Christ with His own resurrected ears.  This is how we come to know the will of God.

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