Our whole life is to be poised on a certain glad expectancy of God; taking each moment, incident, choice and opportunity as material placed in our hand by the Creator whose whole intricate and mysterious process moves toward the triumph of charity, and who has given each living spirit a tiny part in this vast work of transformation.
Evelyn
All gardeners know the importance of good root development before we force the leaves and flowers. So our life in God should be deeply rooted and grounded before we presume to expect to produce flowers and fruits; otherwise we risk shooting up into one of those lanky plants which can never do without a stick. We are constantly beset by the notion that we ought to perceive ourselves springing up quickly, like the seed on stony ground; show striking signs of spiritual growth. But perhaps we are only required to go on quietly, making root, growing nice and busy; docile to the great slow rhythm of life.
When we see no startling marks of our own religious progress or our usefulness to God, it is well to remember the baby in the stable and the little boy in the streets of Nazareth. The very life was there present, which was to change the whole history of the human race, the rescuing action of God. At that stage there was not much to show for it; yet there is perfect continuity between the stable and the Easter garden, and the thread that unites them is the hidden Will of God. The childish prayer of Nazareth was the right preparation for the awful prayer of the Cross.
So it is that the life of the Spirit is to unfold gently and steadily within us; till at the last the full stature for which God designed us is attained. It is an organic process, a continuous Divine action; not a sudden miracle or a series of jerks. Therefore there should be no struggle, impatience, self-willed effort in our prayer and self-discipline; but rather a great flexibility, a homely ordered life, a gentle acceptance of what comes to us, and a still gentler acceptance of the fact that much we see in others is still out of our own reach.
The prayer of the growing spirit should be free, humble, simple, full of confidence and full of initiative too. The mystics constantly tell us that the goal of this prayer, and of the hidden life which shall itself become more and more of a prayer, is union with God. We meet this phrase often: far too often, for we lose the wholesome sense of its awfulness. What does union with God mean? Not a nice feeling which we enjoy in devout movements. This may or may not be a by-product of uinon with God; probably not. it can never be its substance. Union with God means such an entire self-giving to the Divine Charity, such identification with its interests, that the whole of our human nature is transformed in God ...
As we draw near Christmas, the sense of our own need and of the whole world's need of God's coming--never greater perhaps than it is now--becomes more intense.... We seem to hear the voice of the whole suffering creation saying, 'Come! Give us wisdom, give us light, deliver us, liberate us, lead us, teach us how to live. Save us.' And we, joining in that prayer, unite our need with the one need of the whole world. We have to remember that the answer to the prayer was not a new and wonderful world order but Bethlehem and the Cross; a life of complete surrender to God's will; and we must expect this answer to be worked out in our own lives in terms of humility and sacrifice.
If our lives are ruled by this spirit of Advent, this loving expectation of God, they will have a quality quite different from that conventional piety. For they will be centered on an entire and conscious dependence upon the supernatural love which supports us; hence all self-confidence will be destroyed in them and replaced by perfect confidence in God.
We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual, even on the religious plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of the spiritual life.
Divide the world into "mine" and "not mine" and unreal standards are set up, claims and cravings begin to fret the mind. We are the slaves of our own property. We drag with us not a treasure, but a chain.... Accept Poverty, however, demolish ownership, the verb "to have" in every mood and tense, and this downward drag is at an end. At once the Cosmos belongs to you, and you to it. You escape the heresy of separateness, are "made one," and merged in "the greater life of the All." Then, a free spirit in a free world, the self moves upon its true orbit; undistracted by the largely self-imposed needs and demands of ordinary earthly existence.
Joy and peace come into our lives then, when we mind more about God than we do about ourselves, when we realize what the things that matter really are. The Spirit clears up our problems about what we want or ought to be at, simplifies us and throw us back again and again on the deep and peaceful action of God.
There is no real occasion for tumult, strain, conflict, anxiety, once we have reached the living conviction that God is All. All takes place within God. God alone matters; God alone is. Our spiritual life is God?s affair, because whatever we may think to the contrary, it is really produced by God?s steady attraction and our humble and self-forgetful response to it. It consists in being drawn, at God?s pace and in God?s way, to the place where God wants us to be.
The true rule of poverty consists in giving up those things which enchain the spirit, divide its interests, and deflect it on its road to God - whether these things be riches, habits, religious observances, friends, interests, distastes, or desires - not in mere outward destitution for its own sake. It is attitude, not act, that matters; self-denudation would be unnecessary were it not for our inveterate tendency to attribute false value to things the moment they become our own.