Terrible Friday

Listen to the phrasing of our prayers: Please heal her--but if not, then your will be done. Please give me a job--but if not, your will be done. Please bring home my lost child--but if not, your will be done.

We are praying humbly. We are saying that we know that God knows better than we do. But many times our phrasing seems to imply that God's will is always the bad thing--malignancy, poverty, bereavement. We speak as if we think God wants to hurt us, and if we're lucky he'll give us our way and not wreak his terrible will on us.

Too often the conventional conception of "God's will" as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love....

We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening ....

When we understand ... we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality. (Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation)

When Christ prayed in the garden of Gethsemane to be spared the agony of the cross and concluded, "Yet not as I will, but as you will," it turned out that God's will was indeed terrible to behold. Sometimes it will be so in our own lives. Yet even in such circumstances we must remember, as Christ surely remembered, that we pray for God's will to be done because His will is the best, most wonderful thing that could happen to us, even if it is also the most terrible thing we can imagine.