When you think about it, the latter saying is the better one. It calls us to prayer precisely because what we do matters, and whatever we do we want it to be what God wants us to do. So, we need to spend time in prayer, giving God the opportunity to form our will to his. And if we work as though everything depends on God, then if he wants to stop something we’re involved in then we don’t have to agonise over it and be distraught – primarily because it would affect our ego and pride.
I think about these things in relation to the Mall project (a local mission opportunity that showed promise for church and community engagement, that had the potential to be a proper 'fresh expression' of church). We have prayed and worked hard for it, but if we don’t get the funding for it then it can’t happen as we had envisaged it, and I’ll take it that God doesn’t want it to go ahead that way. That’s fine, I wouldn’t be heartbroken, embarrassed, or dismayed.
It connects with the idea of ‘indifference’, or as I would like to call it, ‘holy indifference’. That’s about freely and completely letting something go when its plain that it must be let go. It’s also about sitting light to things in life so that the freedom to love is not constrained by the love of things, be they possessions, work, projects, etc.
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4 comments:
I like this thought a lot Tony...i think it actually takes a lot of the straining out of living the Christian life....
ANDY P
thanks andy,
yes, i think there is much the old masters can teach us who are of the protestant work ethic. keep reading the things to come....
Your reference to Ignatius reminded me of the Jesuit writer Gerrard Hughes, whom I met when he was catholic chaplain at Glasgow University in the late 1960's.
In his 1985 book "God of Surprises" he makes the point that once we thnk we are beginning to understand the "nature" of God ..... we can suddenly be surprised.......
As an atheist I do not like the word "God", or its translations from Arabic, Hebrew etc., such as Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah etc. By putting a name on something we think we are beginning to understand it - and that starts to take the sense of Mystery out of human experience.
as someone who loves the mystics too, i think i get what you're saying. the interesting thing is though, that notwithstanding the awesome mystery of god it is he who wants to have a relationship with us, and showed himself most fully to us in a way we could understand through jesus.
it is he who has come to us, graciously, to bring us a way to become more fully human beings - fully alive to life, to mystery, to wonder, to each other, to god.
staggering really....
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