If It Be Your Will

Those of us who believe in a God who is active in the world may be tempted to substitute our own will to that of God.  We assume that because we want something, God must want the same thing.  We can also believe that God will intervene and set the world right according to how we believe the world should be. 

How often are we tempted to demand that God do something.  We want God to bring an end to COVID – cast out the demon COVID and free us from being enslaved by it.  Why won’t God do this?  After all, Jesus cast out many demons in his ministry.  Why can’t he cast out the demon COVID?  Jesus was tempted by Satan to cast himself down from the heights and see if God the Father would send angels to save him – but he replied to the tempter, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” 

There is a marvelous phrase I heard which describes this desire to have God do our bidding.  It is ‘God the butler’.  We want to keep God downstairs out of the way until we call on God to do our bidding – to serve us.  God does not work that way as Jesus shows us. 

The Society of Saint John the Evangelist sends out a word every day with a  short reflection on that word.  It is entitled Show Me a Word.  A few days ago, the word for the day was ‘will’:

We cannot control what Jesus will or will not do, and we will never fully know what to expect from him. But we can be assured that whatever he does or does not do will be consonant with the Kingdom of God. He acts in accordance with the divine rule, whose presence he embodies and whose coming he announces. Br. David Vryhof,

As much as we would wish and hope that we could control the world and have it run as we would like it to be run, God does not work that way and given what people are like it is probably a good thing. Does that mean that prayer is pointless?  After all, if God is going to do what God wants, what is the point?  I have asked myself that many times in my life and I always come back to the realization that I must pray and always know that I am leaving it in God’s hands and so I usually end my prayers with the acclamation, ‘Fulfil my requests as may be best for us’. 

 May God be with you and bless you on your journey.

Driven or Led

Last Sunday, we had the Gospel reading was the account of Jesus going into the wilderness following his baptism.  This was a time of preparation to begin his public ministry.  For those of us who are Christians, it is also is a summation of what we do in the season of Lent which is modeled after Jesus’ forty days and nights in the wilderness.  There is much which we can explore around this including what does it mean to be in a time of wilderness in our lives or what does it mean to do the traditional exercise of giving up something for Lent which, again is modeled on the forty-day fast that Jesus experienced before he had his encounter with that tempter extraordinaire, Satan.

What I invite you to consider today, whether or not you observe Lent, is the concept of following the spirit in your life.  Jesus was led or was driven – depending on which account in the Gospels your read – into the desert by the Holy Spirit after his baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan River.  Do you have a sense that your life is being influenced or guided by what could be considered a spirit or force in your life?  You may not identify this as the Holy Spirit or God by any other name.  It can be considered as something which has guided you in following a path which seems to have been laid out for you at an early stage in your life.

Whatever that influence is, there may be times when it seems to take you to places that you don’t really wan to go.  This was the case, I believe, for Jesus when he was – according to the Gospel of Mark – “driven” by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness rather being “led” according to Matthew and Luke by that same Spirit into that very unwelcoming environment.

There are times when we are led or driven or encouraged to go places by that influence - be it conscience or guilt or whatever – that we don’t really want to go  to do things or go places that we know we should be that are not going in our mind to be all that welcome or welcoming.  It is helpful to reflect on these experiences and try to understand why we are being encourage to go there and what it is that benefit we might receive by following that encouragement.  If we are honest with ourselves, we will probably know in our hearts that this is what we are intended to do. 

I would encourage you to follow that influence and see what happens.  You may find that you are blessed on your journey.

The Enneagram: Part 5

“Get thee behind me Satan!”  This is Jesus cry when tempted by the disciple Peter — his rock but also his impetuous one who always acted before he thought — or perhaps he just didn’t think at this point in his life in any case.   Peter wanted Jesus to deny what he must do — go to Jerusalem and all that that entailed; ending with his crucifixion, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’

The temptation to avoid change — to want things to stay the same even if we know in our hearts that they need to change — is one of the challenges we face.  The Ego is all about not changing.  The Ego wants to maintain the status quo above all else and will do all it can to put up barriers to doing things differently even if we know that we need to change if we are to do God’s will or even do what is obviously good for us.  As Rohr and Ebert note, “all of us create in the course of our development certain ideals, whose realization we pursue.  Our self-image is determined largely by these ideals.”

It not surprizing that each of the nine Enneagram types has its own temptation just as it has its own root sin as I discussed last time.  The temptation is categorized by Richard Rohr and Andreas along with two other ways of avoiding change — avoidance and resistance.  These three mechanisms works in different ways but with the same goal — to avoid change.      

The Temptation which is identified for each type is:

Type 1   Perfection	Type 6   Security
Type 2   Helping others	Type 7   Idealism
Type 3   Efficiency	Type 8   Justice
Type 4   Authenticity	Type 9   Self-deprecation
Type 5   Knowledge

 

The Resistance (Defense) Mechanism which is identified with each type is:

Type 1   Vexation	Type 6   Inappropriate behaviour
Type 2   Supressed neediness	Type 7   Pain
Type 3   Failure	Type 8   Weakness
Type 4   Ordinariness	Type 9   Conflict
Type 5   Emptiness

                         The Avoidance Mechanism which is identified with each type is:

Type 1   Control of reactions	Type 6   Projection
Type 2   Repression	Type 7   Rationalization
Type 3   Identification	Type 8   Denial
Type 4   Artistic sublimation	Type 9   Numbing
Type 5   Withdrawal (segmentation)

 It is perhaps not surprizing that there are so many ways humankind has come up with to avoid change.  We seem to be exceedingly creative in finding ways to maintain the position which we have. 

In closing I would like to pose the question for all of us to consider, “what is one of the ways in which you hold on to you self-image — Richard Rohr names this your ‘False Self’ — which you would need to change to come closer to the image of you that God intends you to have?”  This is, in the words of Richard Rohr, is your ‘True Self’