the Lord is ever at work breaking down our resistances to his grace.
Only one year left…and all will come to an end!
Only one week left…and the sale on (…) will be over!
Only one day left…to purchase your SIM card!
Only one minute left…for you to ponder the above!
Only a few seconds left…and this message will self-destruct.
After which?… Nobody knows!
What time frame do you generally operate within? The 5-year-and-more plan? The annual? Semi-annual? Or do you go by the month? The week? The day?
I find that as the number of years increases, the time frame for considering operations diminishes. More and more, I’m content to just get through the day, the morning, the next five minutes. No more long-term goals or closely adhered to schedules that map out a plan of action and goals to be accomplished. Or, at least, a lot less of all this than I used to do.
Now there is a growing desire to just let God’s plan unfold, whatever it may be and however mysterious. There is an expression one hears around Madonna House and elsewhere from time to time about all this—God’s perfect plan. I never use it myself because it sounds so redundant! If it’s God’s plan, one presumes already that it is perfect. How could God come up with an imperfect plan?
Perhaps what people are trying to express with this may be that God’s plans are carried out by highly imperfect people in a highly imperfect world. So the word “perfect” is used to assure us that God is really carrying out his goals, despite all the surprises, disappointments, and questions this means for us.
For myself, I find it’s quite a challenge keeping up with, let alone figuring out, just what God’s (perfect) plans are! I’m reminded of a saying or proverb that Catherine Doherty used to use around here: “The millstones of God grind slow, but exceedingly fine.”
I take that to mean that it seems God’s purposes happen kind of imperceptibly, to the point of being difficult to perceive, and lead one to question whether anything of God’s will is happening at all. And yet, experience has proven that deep within the crevices of life, the Lord is arranging things and working out his purposes, both in the world at large and deep within the mysterious chambers of the human heart.
Then, one day, a day no one expected, the Lord’s working suddenly becomes visible, and we marvel and even tremble at the sight and the wondrous mysteriousness of God’s ways.
One such moment was the year 1989 (or thereabouts) when Communist governments in Eastern Europe fell, one after the other, like so many dominos. It was something no one was expecting, even though many had been praying rosaries for this intention for decades. Russia itself opened up for a time, but, tragically, has come again under the dark rule of grim and heartless authority.
There is more than one example of this today in so many parts of the world. And then there is the darkness of human hearts harboring hatred of God and man and ready to carry out actions that express this in violence and cruelty. Where is God’s (perfect) plan in all this? What is being ground down between his millstones so that even this can be transformed into pure gold?
We seldom see the answers to such questions. But we do know that this is what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer, for example: that his kingdom come, that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. All this is surely coming about, as are all the promises of redemption and salvation foretold with such poetic brilliance by the prophets.
A question that arises in the face of all this is “What can I do about it all?” It would seem that “not much” would be an appropriate reply. But maybe we should not come to such a conclusion too quickly. There is an exceedingly fine aspect to all this that we’d do well not to overlook.
As the Lord grinds us down by life’s challenges of getting older, or suffering from some malady or another, or meeting tragedy even at a young age, he is busily and invisibly at work in our hearts, seeking to grind them to the point where there is no hard piece left: all is fine grain or seed turned to flour, which is a way of saying in imagery that the Lord is ever at work breaking down our resistances to his grace.
He is secretly but relentlessly smashing our skepticism, annihilating our pride, and scattering our conviction that we actually understand what is needed — if only others would listen to us! Whatever our limited understanding, only a recreated heart, a new heart, can begin to perceive the appearing of the divine in the midst of so much human distortion and rebellion.
Yes, what is needed is a new heart, a new spirit within. Then we can let ourselves be led by God in what we do. And perhaps more importantly, we can let our hearts be vessels of prayer for God’s holy will to be accomplished as it reveals itself to us, or even as it baffles us.
I like the idea of a vessel best—where we become living libations poured out in loving service and prayer for our neighbors, our city or country, or even for the whole world itself.
But this happens mostly unbeknown to us. We are simply trying to get dressed, make some breakfast perhaps, and occasionally share reflections on all this with someone interested. Part of God’s perfect planning is to keep us mostly in the dark, lovingly embraced by the grinding stones of mercy and purification, so that we, too, can say, like St. Paul, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”
At least that is our hope as we begin another year in earthly time, living as we do on the edge of eternity, pierced as we are by the longing eternity brings as it makes us ready to dwell there in fullness.
One closing thought about all this grinding down. Before one gets down to the grinding business, the chaff needs to be blown one way or another and separated from the wheat. The wheat, which has substance to it, falls earthward while the lighter weight chaff, having little substance, is blown away. The Lord says in the Gospel “to be burned.”
How good God is to blow away by the breath of the Spirit what has no true spiritual substance in us so that what remains can be transformed into his Son, the only true and substantial Bread! May that Bread be multiplied a thousand times over in us in this New Year!
