Daily Reading for February 20
What are we assuming when we ask to know God’s will? Are we imagining a God who, like a master planner, has a five-year, ten-year, or lifetime plan mapped out for us and leaves it up to us to figure out what it is? Are our discernments basically concerned with “getting it right,” with making the choice that down the road we will be able clearly to see was “correct” because everything came out in the end in a neatly wrapped, manageable package?
I prefer to rephrase the question and thus to reframe the reference somewhat. I ask instead, “What is God’s longing for our lives?” Such reframing will situate us in the arms of a God who desires the fulfillment of creation, who longs for justice, mercy, and love to dwell among the creatures and the created world fashioned in the divine image and likeness. We are unique, unrepeatable, loving responses to the divine desire. There is a particularity to our reciprocal desiring. But the path of love that I walk is neither predetermined nor clear-cut. It is forged in the process of walking day by day, listening deeply to the silence brooding beneath the noisy instructions issuing from without and within our own hearts. God’s will is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be lived into. It is a mystery whose contours emerge as we journey on.
One of the pieces of our Lenten journey is cultivating the art of discernment, listening for the voice of God in the wilderness of our hearts, trying to sense the divine will. Discernment is part of our ongoing conversion, our ongoing struggle with the holy mystery and creative chaos that we encounter as we turn toward the rising beacon of the light of Christ.
From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).