Sunday, January 10 – Annamarie Torpey
January 10th, 2010Click on the title to hear the sermon and musical interlude:
“Thy Will Be Done”
Or for those of you who would rather read, here is the text of the sermon! The readings are 1 Kings 19: 11-13, Mark 14: 32-36 (text follows the sermon).
Thy Will Be Done
Catherine of Sienna, a woman recognized by the Catholic Church as a saint, said “If you are what you are meant to be, you will set the whole world on fire.” I took this to mean that God has plans for each of us, and if we live those plans out the world can be an amazing place. The trouble is discerning what those plans are. I hope to share with you some of my ideas on how to listen to God for a message on what you are truly meant to be.
Ignatius of Loyola, another Catholic saint and the founder of the Order of Jesuits, had an experience of hearing God’s message in a relatable way. There was no burning bush or sudden vision of Jesus Christ. He had a subtle feeling and recognized it for what it was – a sign from God. After being injured in a war, he was laid up in bed for quite some time, and he was left with nothing to read but a book on the lives of the saints, and a book about the life of Jesus. He preferred heroic and romantic stories about knights, but he was very bored, so he read what was available to him. He liked to imagine himself as the hero of stories as he read them, so he spent a lot of time imagining himself as both a knight in service to the king, and a soldier in God’s army. He found that when he thought about being a knight, he was left feeling tired and empty, but when he imagined himself as a saint, he was left feeling renewed and energized. Ignatius came to realize that this was God’s way of telling him that if he devoted his life to God, his spirit would be renewed. As I said, here there was no flash of light from on high, no thundering voice, simply a feeling deep down inside himself and a slow realization of what that feeling meant.
We can see that God’s will will be done eventually, there’s no sense in resisting it, it’s just a matter of how long you struggle with discontent and lack of fulfillment before finding the right path. Some people live their whole lives searching, and only upon reflection do they realize they touched their chosen path at some point in their lives but drifted away again, or, they discover it was the journey they were on the whole time, something as simple as having a family and raising their children to be good people. That’s not to say that you should just kick back and relax and assume everything will fall into place, you need to actively listen for what your course of action should be and look for signs and messages that you’re on the right path.
But how do I listen? Everyone has his or her own way of listening to God, and it’s important to find a way that you’re comfortable with. I’ve come up with a few suggestions after talking to many people about how they listen to God. The first, and most obvious, is through prayer. Prayer doesn’t have to be the recitation of a few memorized lines, or a desperate cry for help, it can be a daily conversation with God. I encourage you to make up your own prayers that are significant to you, thanking God for the things He has provided and asking for direction and guidance as you move through your life. There are many, many ways to pray. Some people enjoy praying in groups, picking a topic or person to pray about for that meeting, others say daily private prayers upon waking or at bedtime. Most people pray in church on Sunday with the congregation. These are all good ways of starting a dialogue with God.
Another form of prayer is meditation, but just as there are many ways to pray there are a million ways to mediate. It’s a matter of finding the right fit for you. You might silently focus on the flame of a candle while trying to clear your mind of chatter, you might walk a labyrinth or trace a handheld labyrinth with your finger, or you might enjoy guided meditation where you listen to a story and let your mind make up the details.
Another way to listen for God’s voice is to write or journal. I suggest keeping a notebook handy so you can jot down those flashes of ideas that come to you. They might just be God directing you to pay attention to something. Keeping a daily journal is a good way to track patterns in your life. You can find the recurring themes and feelings and trace them back to their sources. Keeping a dream diary can be another good exercise; sometimes God speaks to our unconscious mind more easily. You can also write letters to God asking for guidance and examining what you think His plans are for you.
Sometimes God speaks to us through other people, so developing your listening skills is important. Listen closely to your friends, relatives, and spiritual advisors and look for patterns that emerge in those conversations. I especially listen closely to children when I speak with them. Does a recurring theme continue to arise? Is there some common thread or idea that keeps popping up in your life through the words of friends, television commercials, news events, posted flyers, or in your dreams? This is where keeping a journal can come in handy.
Another important part of discerning God’s will for us is learning to tell the difference between God’s actual will and our own desires. I think it’s important to examine our motivations to help us figure this out. Ask yourself: why are you invested in a particular outcome? Is it because you’ve prayerfully thought it through and feel peaceful and joyful when thinking about it? Or do you have some selfish motivation? It’s okay to want nice things to happen in our lives – God doesn’t will for us all to be ascetic hermits who constantly self-flagellate. The question should be: why do we want these things? Will a better job allow us to be closer to God? Will a relationship with a particular person bring more love (and therefore more God) into our lives? The questions to ask yourself about the things you want to happen or the decisions you make are these: how will this bring me closer to God? How will this allow God to be more present in my life? What effect will this have on my spirituality?
In addition to examining our motivations, another thing to watch out for is mistaking chance events and happenings as “signs” from God. God truly does send us signs, but how do we know when we experience one? It’s easy to see “signs” from God everywhere if you’re looking for them: a green light, a chance meeting with someone, finding a lost item. But are those really signs, or more coincidences? Ask yourself these questions: did this enhance my relationship with the Divine? Do I have a sense of peace or joy? What message is God trying to send me with this happening?
Ultimately, to live God’s will, we have to let go of the outcome. As Fraulein Maria’s Mother Superior told her in The Sound of Music, “Where God closes a door He always opens a window.” Sometimes the things we think God is directing us to do don’t work out. In that case, it’s not the end result that was God’s will for us, it was something along the journey. This might mean that someone starts a program of study, and works hard for many years, only to be denied admission to the graduate program they thought would be best for them. But what has been learned along the way? What skills have been developed? What connections and relationships have been formed? Perhaps those were the things God willed for us, rather than the outcome we willed for ourselves.
In our first reading today we heard about God speaking to Elijah. In Elijah’s story I like the example of the “still small voice,” which is his real message from God. Despite all the seeming “signs” that happen before his eyes—earthquakes, winds, fires—he recognizes that the Lord was not in any of those. It is only when he hears the quiet whispering that he feels in his being that the Lord has come to speak to him. This can be likened to any one of us listening for a sign from God as to what he wills for us. It may not come through a burning bush or an earthquake, it may be the equivalent of a “still, small voice.” That voice might be the voice of a friend or loved one or stranger nudging us in the right direction, or it might be a thought that pops into our heads in the middle of the night. We have to discern, however, if the Lord is really in the wind or not, and wait for that feeling inside our being that lets us know it’s time to come out of the cave and face what the Lord has in store for us.
In our New Testament reading, we heard about Jesus “stepping out of the cave,” so to speak, to face God’s will for him, and turning over his human will to follow God’s will, even though it meant his imminent death. Jesus was anguished in the garden, he would have preferred not to die on the cross, we can see that in what he says, but he understands that he has a destiny to fulfill on earth, and that ultimately, the will of God will bring about an immense good, making the divine more accessible to mankind. While none of us will ever have quite this kind of decision to make, there are times in each of our lives when we might want to give up the cup God has given us. Perhaps the path God seems to want us on is a harder path to follow than the one we’d will for ourselves, maybe we’ve made sacrifices in our lives to live a more heavenly life. But ultimately, there will be rewards! The reward is a closer relationship with God, and being elevated to a heavenly state. Sure we can’t BE Jesus Christ and do what he did, but we can be more LIKE Jesus and do our own tasks as he would have done them.
Two more examples I’d like to offer you are those of the prophet Jeremiah and Mary of Nazareth. Jeremiah spoke to God on a regular basis and received messages from Him. The gist of Jeremiah’s teachings was that the true center of a religious life was not the temple itself or the religious rites, but rather a personal relationship with God. His teachings show us that it is only through a personal dialogue with God that we can hear his call to us. We must “live God” to know God.
As we all know, an angel came down and told Mary that she was to give birth to God’s child, and she was afraid at first, but accepted what the angel was telling her and rejoiced in God’s glorification of her. But imagine how that must have seemed to a young girl! To have an angel of the Lord appear and announce that your life is going to take a drastically different path from the one you’ve planned for yourself…at the same time, Mary was free to say “no.” Just as we are all free to accept or reject God’s will for us, Mary was given a choice in the matter of whether or not she would bear the Son of God. Only because she was so “full of Grace,” did she accept without hesitation this offer to serve God. Mary is the ultimate example of someone hearing a call from God and turning her life over in service to Him.
Also in the scripture, during Jesus’ ministry, he often said “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” I think this is about discerning God’s call to us all. Jesus opened up the ears of the deaf so that they might be able to listen to him preach God’s message, and loosed the tongues of the mute so they might be able to spread the word. He didn’t do this for his own glorification, or to prove anything to anyone – remember he usually forbids them to tell anyone he healed them – but rather that they might be more free to live their lives according to God’s plan for them. Jesus and God want us all to be whole and happy, and listening for our calling is how we can be more fulfilled.
Swedenborg makes his feeling about following God’s will perfectly clear. His second “Rule of Life” is to submit everything to the will of Divine Providence. This can be hard to do, because, as I’ve discussed already, it is sometimes difficult to discern what the “will of Divine Providence” even is. And even when we know it, we have our self-will to contend with, which often doesn’t want us to do what we should. I think it’s the sentiment behind the rule—the intention—that is most important. Of course we can’t submit everything perfectly, because as fallible human beings perfection is beyond our grasp, and as part of that, so is perfect knowledge. We can’t possibly know everything, so we can’t really ever know with certainty what God’s will is for us. We can only do our best to lead heavenly lives, guided by feelings and prayer, and hope that we’ve got our best foot forward. However, using all of the techniques I’ve discussed to discern God’s will can still be helpful!
I thought in closing I’d share with you a few examples from my own life of ways I listen to God. The first is through journaling. I’m an extroverted thinker and learner, which means that I need to discuss ideas with others in order to fully formulate them. However, I’ve developed the skill of “pretending” to have discussions by writing down my thoughts as if I were saying them, and then writing down any arguments I can think of and my responses. That way I can also keep track of my thought processes. I’m not good at quiet contemplation, but writing for me is akin to meditation. I sit silently and let my fingers do the thinking for me while my mind stays blank. If any thoughts pop into my head I pull them out and jot them down and then return to my blank state of mind.
In the past year I have become a listener, something I thought I’d never be. But I’ve found that there are important themes that keep coming up in the lives and conversations of other people that relate to me. There’s a saying in AA that there’s a message at every meeting just for you, and if you listen, you’ll hear exactly what you need to hear at that moment. I have found this to be very true in my own life. Two examples I can think of are of a time when I was feeling lost as to what I should be doing with my life, and I heard a woman share in her story about being a teacher of high school students and how fulfilling it was. I remembered back to my days as an assistant ESL teacher at Albany High and was filled with that same sense of fulfillment she spoke of. I had totally forgotten my dream of being a high school English teacher and needed just then to be reminded of it. Another message I got was that courage is not the absence of fear, courage is being terrified and doing it anyway. I needed to hear that one too, right at the moment I heard it.
Two other things in AA (or NA) that relate to listening to God’s call are the third step and its corresponding prayer. The third step is “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” This is something anyone can do, not just those in recovery. Turning your will and your life over simply means that you will try at all times to live the life God wants you to be living. I don’t mean that you necessarily have a “destiny” to fulfill, but there is some direction in life that will make you happiest and most at peace, and that is where God wants you to be. That’s all God wants for us is to be as fulfilled as human beings as we possibly can be, therefore living in a heavenly state. This means moving away from things that are destructive and moving towards things that are constructive.
The third step prayer is simply “Take my will and my life, guide me in my recovery, show me how to live.” This is a simple prayer that I say every day, but it can be modified by any one of you to be used in your daily prayer practices. Maybe you’d like to say “Take my will and my life, guide me on my journey, show me how to live.” By turning your will and your life over you are not giving anything up, you are choosing to return to a state of union with God, which is where you came from and where we all try to return to.
In conclusion, God has given each of us wonderful gifts, but He never forces those gifts upon us, they’re ours for the taking, to be opened and used or not. It’s only a matter of discovering what’s inside the package, and how it’s meant to be used (He doesn’t tend to include instruction manuals). But don’t shake the box too hard trying to figure out what’s inside! It might be fragile!
1 Kings 19:11-13
And he said, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Mark 14:32-36
They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”
Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
