Fr. Julian Carron, Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity
of Communion and Liberation, 2011
of Communion and Liberation, 2011
This text was part of my reading for today. I am deeply struck by how much it describes my ordinary mentality. How easy it is to think of "God's will" as something external and even capricious, something that is alien to the deepest desire of my being. I try to obey God's will and keep His commands, but deep down I think that if only I could do it my way, according to what I perceive in the moment, on the surface of things, then I would really be happy. I have to do God's will, however, because He is bigger and stronger than I am.
How alienating this is, and yet how easy it is to be tinged with this kind of perception in one's practical attitude, no matter how much theology one knows. But it's wrong as a practical attitude, and it results in getting nowhere (as Fr. Carron says). It's not true about God and it's not true about myself. But to really change, I need more than a theoretical understanding of this. I need to know this in a vital way, from within my engagement of life. I need to know it from the heart. What God wants corresponds to what will make me truly happy. That is the truth about reality, even when it doesn't "seem" that way to my limited human perceptions and whims. God's will is what is, really, "for me"! Nothing else can make me happy.
I must beg God to help me become more aware of this truth, and stay with other people who help me to remember it.
