How the Demon Reverses Our Spiritual Vision
Like many Catholics today, I often find myself praying as to what is God's will for me and feeling a sense of inadequacy as to whether or not I am moving in God's will or am, in fact, far off the beaten path, something that will be revealed to me when Jesus reviews my life. In my spiritual direction ministry this is also the usual line of approach that I find in those who are pursuing the path of holiness. Am I doing Gods Will? Is this the right choice. What path in life should I choose? Of course this becomes more acute when young and life choices do have to be realistically made.
While these questions have to be asked at certain junctures, and it is good to consider our inadequacy in falling short for the sake of growing in humility, there can also be a snare if the line of questioning becomes an obsession. Everything is fodder for the demons to bring us to destruction, and if we are walking the path of holiness the devil will quickly switch to using spiritual things to hammer us with. This is clear from the second week rules of discernment of spirits given through St Ignatius f Loyola. The issue of God's Will became clearer to me recently through a sort of interior epiphany, as if going from a knowing in my intellect to a knowing in my interior. In asking always what the path or trajectory of God's Will is we can subtly move out of the present moment towards a proximate future direction that always remains just that, something in the future. In the times in which we are living, the world is on auto-destruct and we are becoming aware of a prophetic pulse through various mystics, and we hear of things such as the illumination of conscience and the cup of Divine Justice. In this milieu we can subtly lose hope and move in fear and scrupulosity, constantly looking in the rea view mirror to check we have made the right turn there and apprehending the next turn farther on. Suddenly we can find out through the obsession in getting it right, that we are no longer in God's Will moving in the Spirit. The very thing we have worked so hard at has slipped from our grasp because it was never in our grasp in the first place and our vision has been reversed. We can be in real danger of burying the talent in the handkerchief out of fear of losing it. The attitude of "getting it right" spiritually, or "I've got this!" is a particularly strong in the American culture where the Protestant work ethic in the culture creeps into the Catholic church too. Spiritual strongholds for sure.
The problem with this way of thinking is that we believe we are the protagonists, when God is. He loved us first and even our praise is His gift to us. Certainly we do have to cooperate and that cooperation, that penance is to make room for His action as the Divine protagonist in our lives. So I found that I too was asking too much what does God want me to do, with a certain disquiet, and my thoughts were a shade into the future, but just a shade so I hardly noticed that it wasn't the present moment. Then suddenly I heard the Lord say, LET ME ACT. It's all so simple really, in ruminating about my vision of God's will I lost sight of it from His perspective. LET ME ACT. It's all He asks, for us to give Him permission to act in our lives in whatever way is necessary right now and in each "now" moment. Then suddenly black and white changes to color and the mundane everyday thing is actually God speaking to me, to each of us. Even a flower becomes an "I love you" from God to the beholder. When I was a child I really didn't plan my future. I let my Mum and Dad do it, and when I did do it at first the burden was still on them, so I remained carefree.
LET ME ACT. It's the way of childlike trust and abandonment because God though infinitely powerful and intelligent is also infinitely simple, so that only a child can receive Him.
What a great post!
‘LET ME ACT’ is like a request from God to be more Marian! eh?