What do you mean the "Our Father" is dangerous? part 3

Letter to Dan J. Russ “The Dangers of the Lord’s Prayer” continued…

“Thy will be done.”  Who are we kidding? The reason I pray is that I want the Almighty — if He is in fact almighty, or even if He exists at all — to give me what I want and to do what I tell Him to do. I light candles and say endless novenas in order to convince Heaven that it should bend to my will. I have heard it said that the pagans pray asking the powers-that-be to do their bidding.  The belief that the proper rituals, the proper incantations and offerings can cajole the supernatural to do something I want is the very heart of voodoo. I often treat the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ like some Stone Age totem.  

“What will it take for you to do what I want? Maybe a nice plump chicken? Maybe an extra-large candle?”  

(By the way I am all for the lighting of candles and the saying of novenas. Both are very Biblical practices. The first novena was commanded by the Lord as a preparation for the descent of Holy Spirit on Pentecost.  A novena is all about waiting on the Lord, until we hear Him clearly and are able to obey Him more perfectly. Novenas offered in the spirit of expectant prayer and abandonment to the will of God are very powerful prayers. And candles? Lights have been lit as long as there have been Israelites and are still lit by their modern Jewish descendants. I finally understood the lighting of candles when a friend explained his experience at Assisi to me. He had just returned to the faith and was praying at the tomb of St. Francis. He had to leave, but wished he could’ve stayed there praying. He lit a candle to say that his heart was still there at the saint’s tomb. The flame represented his soul abiding there with the Lord. That is exactly why the Jews light candles. They say that the Almighty sends extra souls to help us in joy, in sorrow, in prayer. This is why we light candles. Lit candles express our desire to remain with the Lord in prayer despite the demands that life makes of us. God who set the stars ablaze is not impressed by a candle. He is impressed by the soul that loves him, the heart on fire with love that lit the candle symbolizes.) 

So, after all that, we Christians don’t pray that God, the gods, the spirits, whatever, will do our will. That’s not what we mean by prayer.

I’ve heard that we pray so that we might do God’s will. I suppose that’s a fine thing, but I would take it a step farther. We pray that God would do His own will. 

"What? Isn’t God going to do His will anyway? Why should we pray that God would do His will? If He is almighty and all-knowing, can’t he do as He pleases?"

I suppose He can, but He doesn’t. Do you think that sin and death and sadness are God’s will? What kind of god do you believe in? Is God angry and spiteful and capricious? Certainly the God that Jesus preached wasn’t and isn’t. The fact is that God will do His will only if we allow Him to. We practice the most unique religion in all of history. We have a God who is humble, a God who, unlike His creatures, doesn’t insist on having His own way. If there really is a God who is all powerful, all-knowing and perfectly loving, a God who really loves me, don’t you think His way of doing things, His plan for me and for all of history, is probably better than my own little self-centered plans?  That’s what it means to say “The will be done.” It means that, though I may make some suggestions now and then, I would rather trust that His ways are not my ways, in fact they are a darn sight better than my ways. 

It is a wonder that we who are so arrogant have such a humble God. He took on the form of a slave and was obedient unto death, even death on a cross. He allows Himself to be thwarted at every turn. He does not wish the death of a sinner, but sinners die in their sins all the time. It seems the devil wins repeatedly and God seems to do nothing about it. If all this God business is true, why does He seem to do so little? Simple: Freedom. 

God is Love and without freedom there can be no love.  If I am rich and shower expensive gifts on a poor person in the hopes that he or she will love me, they will probably never really love me. They may think they love me, but it is usually the largesse that they love. The question is this: if I had nothing at all, not health or wealth or beauty, would you still love me? Jesus posed this question to the disciples once. They thought that they would all be on easy street when the revolution came and Jesus would throw out the Romans. Then, when the mob tried to make Him king, he turned on them and said, “Unless you eat My flesh and drink My blood, you cannot have life in you.” They realized then that He wasn’t the Messiah. He was simply crazy and they began to abandon Him. He turned to the disciples and said “Will you also leave Me?” 

Peter said, “Lord, where would we go? You have the words of everlasting life.”

I suspect that Judas realized that Jesus was nuts and was going to get them all killed — “Time to ditch this loser!” I probably would have gone with Judas. He had a point. What about it? What would you have said?  There are times in the life of the believer when Jesus says, “What if there was nothing in this for you, not peace, not security, not even heaven in the end? Will you still follow Me?” 

If our answer is, “Nothing, well I suppose I might look into a more useful religion!” then we were never following Him in the first place. We were simply following the things we thought He would provide us. To be a Christian is to follow Him because we love Him. 

God has given us real and complete freedom in order to give us the possibility of real and complete love, because He is Love. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “He cannot ravish. He can only woo.” (Screwtape Letters, Chapter 8) To be forced to love is to be rendered unable to love. God gives us the ability to say “No” to Him eternally. In the end, we will have to choose between our will and God’s will; we will choose either heaven or hell. God does not send anyone to hell unless they choose it, but when we say “No” to heaven, we have said “Yes” to hell. How often have heard someone say or, you yourself have said, “There is no God.  I prayed and I did not get what I wanted.”  We may say “Thy will be done,” but what we really mean is, “This is what I want and if you really do exist, you’ll jolly well give me what I want, or you’re not God. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

 

To say the Our Father is to ask God to do whatever he pleases in our lives and to disregard our desires if they are different from His in any way. We are giving Him permission to ignore us if He so chooses. “Thy will be done,” is one of the best lies we tell ourselves and God. 

We manage to convince ourselves that we trust God’s perfect will, but I’m not so sure that we have fooled the Almighty. It is probably the reason God seems to do so little in our lives. We won’t let him do anything because we never give Him the permission for which He so humbly asks. It’s not easy having a humble God, when we and all the gods we really worship are so terribly arrogant.

Next week: Stop reading. It only gets worse.

Does God create some to be eternally damned?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

If God is all-knowing (knows every move we'll make until we die) and all loving... Why does he create souls from inception knowing they will not be with him in heaven? Being all-knowing, he knows when we'll be born, when we'll die and all the choices in between. Example: All God creates is good, yet he knew the choices and evil Hitler would bring upon world... And he created him anyway.  Does it affect our free will if we are created with our choices already known, maybe not known to us, but known by God who creates us anyway?

Yours,
 

Will Freilich
 

 Dear Will,
 

   The answer to this question is the little discussed and much overlooked heart of the Christian faith. Christianity is absolutely contrary to all other religions, at least the ones I know about. Most religions of the world seem to be an attempt to manipulate the powers that be; god, the gods, the forces of nature, etc. etc. to lighten up a bit, or at least a way to cope with the general disappointment that is life on this planet. You know suffering, alienation, crop failure, flooded basements, terminal diseases, death, that sort of thing.

Ancient Roman religion was a kind of voodoo that offered sacrifices just to keep the capricious faceless spirits of nature from making their lives miserable. It was a little like the pre-Walt Disney understanding of leprechauns, fairies and the other quaint creatures of Irish folklore. In truth, the leprechauns and fairies were cut from the same cloth as the banshees. They were nasty little nature spirits that would make life miserable for you if you crossed them. This seems to be a pattern in world folk religions. Religion was all about how to get the powers that be to leave us alone, and a big enough sacrifice might just get them to do what we want. More theologically developed religions like Hinduism and Hellenism had elaborate mythologies that attempted to explain everything. I know very few people, Christians or non-, for whom things similar are not believed.  
 

Your question is THE question. If God is for real and, especially if as the Christians say, He is all-powerful and all-loving, why is life such a struggle?  And if Christianity is right about an all-powerful all loving God, why does He allow eternal evil by creating those he knows will make evil choices and be eternally damned? The answer is, I think: Freedom. 

God has created beings that are truly free for the sake of Love. We Americans think we know all there is to know about freedom and love. We are clueless about both. We mistake freedom for enslavement to our desires and we confuse love with narcissism.  A real choice that reveals the essence of my being is necessary for love. If I must love you, I cannot love you. Here’s an example of what I mean. 
 

We’ve all seen those puff pieces on the telly, an interview with a 20-year old starlet who is about to marry some old geezer who is richer than God. There she sits next to some drooling, 90-year old fool of a billionaire who has one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave. She has hair as blonde as bleach can make it and has clearly had “some work done.” She says something stupid like, “Oh, I don’t care about the money. I love him and would marry him if we were the poorest man in the world.” 
 

In a few months, he dies of enthusiasm and leaves his entire fortune to the blonde bombshell and her two vicious little Chihuahuas. At that point a battle royal ensues between the lawyers of the grieving widow and the lawyers of the first, second and third wives. She didn’t love him. She was unable to love him. She was not free to love him. 
 

Your question rests on the assumption that the purpose of life is happiness, the assumption on which this country is founded. “We have been endowed by our creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We Americans pursue happiness with a vengeance, even if the pursuit makes us miserable. The assumption of the Gospel is different. It holds that the purpose of life is Love because God is Love. (Understand that the specific word used in the Scriptures for this divine love is agape, or in English, sacrificial love, not just emotional attraction or affection.) The catechism says that God made us to know, love and serve Him in this world and so to be happy with Him forever. 

For moderns, the purpose of life is happiness.  For Christians, happiness is not a goal. It is a byproduct, a fruit of having pursued and attained the true purpose of life, which is true love. Heaven created us for Love and so heaven has endowed us with freedom and will not interfere with freedom. In short, we Christians worship a humble God. 
 

Once, many years ago, I was serving in a very poor parish. It was so poor that not only did the windows have no screens; the windows had no windows! I was all alone one day, offering Mass. The little flies were dive-bombing the chalice. In my mind I said to the Lord, “I believe that this is no longer bread and wine, but has become Your body and blood, but couldn’t You convince the fruit flies of this great miracle for just a moment?” 
 

The little voice inside said, “With My hands nailed to the wood of the cross, I was a feast for the flies.”
 

I reeled. I could almost not continue with the Mass. To think that Jesus of Nazareth, whom I believe to be the very hand that set the stars to spinning, could not lift His own hand to swipe the flies from His face. This is God??? 
 

We Christians believe that the All-powerful became powerless for love of us. Greeks and Romans believed that god was power. Muslims believe that god is will. Moderns believe that god is not. We believe that God is Love. Heaven is humble and will not force us to do His will. He will do His will if we ask Him to. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.”  
 

Most people want God to do their will. Some people say we should pray that we are able to do God’s will. The Christian prays that God may do His will because He does not do it unbidden and uninvited. He has tied His own hands, allowed them to be nailed to the wood of the cross until we give Him permission to act as He pleases in our lives. Has it ever occurred to you that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth the Almighty knelt before human freedom? He stooped to wash the feet of Judas, His betrayer. For the sake of Love, He knelt before the man who would kill Him.  God, who is unlimited, has limited Himself for the sake of freedom. 
 

As for God knowing in advance, God does not know in advance. We cannot say that God knows in advance, because there is no “advance” for God. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. We THINK. God simply KNOWS. He is eternal, timeless. We, too, made in God’s image are timeless beings but we live in time. The choices we make are made in time by our timeless selves timelessly. 
 

The mystery of true and absolute human is freedom wrapped up in the mystery of the timelessness of God. It is something that we do not, cannot now perceive, but the very existence of suffering is the evidence of the extremity of the love of God who wishes us to become what He has always been: Infinite Love. When our children suffer, do we wish they had never existed? No, we instinctively understand that sometimes suffering is the price of love.
 

In our smallness we cannot see past the suffering. We look at the cross and see tragedy. Heaven looks at the cross and sees Love, even in the midst of evil and sorrow.  As the old hymn has it, “What wondrous love is this, o my soul?” Hope this helps. 
 

Your Friend,
 

the Rev. Know-it-all