What is "God's Will"?

[BearingMyCross]

I asked this of the apologists, but I didn’t receive an answer, so I’ll ask here.

I have been through some horrible stuff in the past five years. It has broken me twice, and I have suffered so much that I attempted suicide.

I was talking to my priest about whether all that I had been through was “God’s Will.”

He said he didn’t necessarily think so. He said that God’s Will is that I love Him.

So, my whole life I have been thinking that things happen for a reason . . . only now to find out that it is all arbitrary. That things just happen. There is no point. A path didn’t lead me to a place on purpose.

This negates everything I believed that gave purpose to my life. It gave me my sanity in the face of injustice, degredation, and suffering. I made me understand my lot in life. Don’t we all say, “It happened for a reason” or “It was his time to go” or “Only God knows why”? If it isn’t God’s Will, then everybody is clueless.

Now I find out that all God wants me to do is love Him?

I love Him, but how do I make sense of my suffering if He didn’t give it to me? and didn’t give it to for a purpose?

 

[tonyrey]

I asked this of the apologists, but I didn’t receive an answer, so I’ll ask here.

I have been through some horrible stuff in the past five years. It has broken me twice, and I have suffered so much that I attempted suicide.

I was talking to my priest about whether all that I had been through was “God’s Will.”

He said he didn’t necessarily think so. He said that God’s Will is that I love Him.

So, my whole life I have been thinking that things happen for a reason . . . only now to find out that it is all arbitrary. That things just happen. There is no point. A path didn’t lead me to a place on purpose.

You are going from one extreme to the other - understandably in view of your misfortunes. But that is precisely what they are. We are victims of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and subject to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. We are also victims of ignorance, carelessness and malice.

The priest is right. All the saints have suffered but they have overcome their suffering by identifying themselves with Our Lord. We can be martyrs without having to be tortured and murdered for our faith.

This negates everything I believed that gave purpose to my life. It gave me my sanity in the face of injustice, degradation, and suffering. I made me understand my lot in life. Don’t we all say, “It happened for a reason” or “It was his time to go” or “Only God knows why”? If it isn’t God’s Will, then everybody is clueless.

Many things happen for no reason but that does not mean everything is meaningless and purposeless.

Now I find out that all God wants me to do is love Him?

I love Him, but how do I make sense of my suffering if He didn’t give it to me? and didn’t give it to for a purpose?

God doesn’t** give** suffering to anyone but He permits it because it is inevitable. The message of the Cross is that we can overcome it as Jesus did with the power of our love for Him and for others.

You are in our prayers…

 

[In_Spiration]

If there’s one thing Scripture and history show us, it’s that it appears to be the most blessed and holy souls that end up bearing the heaviest effects of original/creature-made sin. Jesus suffered more than any one being has ever or could have ever endured; martyrs were often tortured and humiliated; saints almost always suffer through long periods of social isolation, being cast out or shunned by their homes and loved ones; etc. God commands every man to willfully embrace the Cross. The reason for this just seems to evade us. Maybe it’s because those who love God the most end up feeling intense pain at having to live on a fallen earth, temporarily outside His heavenly kingdom. We have been told that we’ll only be expected to suffer as much as we’ve been offered the grace and help to take (which means it’ll be our fault in the end if we crumbled from the weight of pain, say, if we tried to go it alone and not seek God’s help).

I know that we’re called to be poor in this life because that saves our souls from attaching themselves to the pleasures of this transient world, for only an extraordinarily strong man could live among riches and still rely by choice on Christ enough to be saved. I think a lot of our suffering is like that (which fits w/how the strongest people suffer the most – they’re strongest and most prepared to withstand it). Suffering may be another way of turning us off to this world. Kierkegaard considered “despair” a virtue of sorts, in that he believed it’s the necessary condition of a soul before it can finally decide to take a leap of total faith unto God. Without such total despair, he believed, we will blindly and stubbornly opt to cling to our worldly positions, which is in fact the most desperate state to us since it keeps us out of heaven.

We usually prefer any slight security on earth to the absolute apparent risk of trusting God alone without certainty. Whenever I suffer, I’ll sometimes think it must mean that my present spiritual character is unprepared for worldly joy, that maybe I’d just grow too deceptively complacent, that I should thank God for keeping me on my toes and feeling the need to call on Him for help.

We can speculate that it may have partially to do with the fact that, in a corrupt and fallen world of sinners, goodness will be treated with opposition and revolt. That is, the extent of our sin probably matches the amount us humans by nature react with distaste for true good.

For example, a demon-possessed body isn’t supposed to feel pain from holy water, but it does, simply because its preference for evil is violently thwarted. For the demon, something which helps its spirit makes it suffer, while something damning its spirit seems pleasant.

And I know a good amount of my suffering stems from some event where my pride is damaged or something I unjustly desire is out of my hands. Then, if I’m lucky, I think: “Wait a minute. If the opposite had happened, I probably would’ve inflated my ego or grown spoiled with material comfort; and I really had no such right to what I wanted anyway. The most pain should be felt by wanting yet not receiving God, except He’s assured us that that’s the one thing entirely in our control – if we ask we shall receive – but I clearly don’t want that enough, or else I’d be a saint… Maybe this pain is a warning for me to never stop improving and working on my relationship with God.”

One thing I’m sure about is that we’ll never fully comprehend God’s Will when it comes to evil and suffering. The best response is always to respond with faith and prayer, acknowledging we have no right to demand our understanding it.

 

[Carlan]

You are going from one extreme to the other - understandably in view of your misfortunes. But that is precisely what they are. We are victims of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and subject to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. We are also victims of ignorance, carelessness and malice.

The priest is right. All the saints have suffered but they have overcome their suffering by identifying themselves with Our Lord. We can be martyrs without having to be tortured and murdered for our faith.
Many things happen for no reason but that does not mean everything is meaningless and purposeless.
God doesn’t** give** suffering to anyone but He permits it because it is inevitable. The message of the Cross is that we can overcome it as Jesus did with the power of our love for Him and for others.

You are in our prayers…

Yes, “The Doctrine of the Cross” Math 16.24-27.
Many bad things happen through man’s disobedience, All kinds of it brings suffering to man, the innocent as well the guilty. None of us escape the consequences of the world’s sin. It is hard to understand when our lives are turned upside down in personal suffering.
The day is coming ,though if we persevere in God’s love and grace, when we will understand all finally in Him, Peace to you Bearing my Cross. Carlan

 

[Chris258]

I asked this of the apologists, but I didn’t receive an answer, so I’ll ask here.

I have been through some horrible stuff in the past five years. It has broken me twice, and I have suffered so much that I attempted suicide.

I was talking to my priest about whether all that I had been through was “God’s Will.”

He said he didn’t necessarily think so. He said that God’s Will is that I love Him.

So, my whole life I have been thinking that things happen for a reason . . . only now to find out that it is all arbitrary. That things just happen. There is no point. A path didn’t lead me to a place on purpose.

This negates everything I believed that gave purpose to my life. It gave me my sanity in the face of injustice, degredation, and suffering. I made me understand my lot in life. Don’t we all say, “It happened for a reason” or “It was his time to go” or “Only God knows why”? If it isn’t God’s Will, then everybody is clueless.

Now I find out that all God wants me to do is love Him?

I love Him, but how do I make sense of my suffering if He didn’t give it to me? and didn’t give it to for a purpose?

I am sorry for your suffering, and I hope you will always find your strength and security in the Lord.

About your troubled thoughts concerning Divine Providence, as far as I know, this isn’t an area that is settled by dogma within the Catholic Church. Some Catholics believe there are some things that God actually has absolutely no part in realizing. Your priest may be one of these.

But there is also a strong thread in Catholic theological tradition (esp. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Thomists in general) that does really view absolutely everything that happens as being caused or allowed (not passively but intentionally) in the Divine Will. Though I am no expert on Thomism (I have only read Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s Predestination, you might appreciate it actually), I actually find that perspective attractive in many ways, though it does have very scary implications. As many Catholics have put it, God intentionally allows the evil of the Roman Empire so that the glory of the martyrs will be accomplished.

You shouldn’t feel like you must abandon that perspective because of your priest’s opinion on a matter that’s not (and may never be) settled formally by Catholic dogma.

Not implying that I’ve suffered the depths you have, but I have also had similar thoughts (“Ok, God isn’t causing these things, but he’s allowing them. But why? Could it really be for no reason?”) about my own disordered sexuality and other issues where a person’s identity is warped in some way through no fault of their own. I think I’ve pretty much rejected the idea that there isn’t an accounting of my condition in the Divine Will and it’s this way “just because”. Rather, I hope that by denying myself expression of my disordered sexuality and turning to the Lord for wholeness and completion, God is allowing me something of a intercessory role, united with Christ’s role as our one mediator, for the souls of many lost homosexuals in the world.

I hope I’ve helped, or at least gotten you thinking. Let me know what you think.

 

[Carlan]

If there’s one thing Scripture and history show us, it’s that it appears to be the most blessed and holy souls that end up bearing the heaviest effects of original/creature-made sin. Jesus suffered more than any one being has ever or could have ever endured; martyrs were often tortured and humiliated; saints almost always suffer through long periods of social isolation, being cast out or shunned by their homes and loved ones; etc. God commands every man to willfully embrace the Cross. The reason for this just seems to evade us. Maybe it’s because those who love God the most end up feeling intense pain at having to live on a fallen earth, temporarily outside His heavenly kingdom. We have been told that we’ll only be expected to suffer as much as we’ve been offered the grace and help to take (which means it’ll be our fault in the end if we crumbled from the weight of pain, say, if we tried to go it alone and not seek God’s help).

I know that we’re called to be poor in this life because that saves our souls from attaching themselves to the pleasures of this transient world, for only an extraordinarily strong man could live among riches and still rely by choice on Christ enough to be saved. I think a lot of our suffering is like that (which fits w/how the strongest people suffer the most – they’re strongest and most prepared to withstand it). Suffering may be another way of turning us off to this world. Kierkegaard considered “despair” a virtue of sorts, in that he believed it’s the necessary condition of a soul before it can finally decide to take a leap of total faith unto God. Without such total despair, he believed, we will blindly and stubbornly opt to cling to our worldly positions, which is in fact the most desperate state to us since it keeps us out of heaven.

We usually prefer any slight security on earth to the absolute apparent risk of trusting God alone without certainty. Whenever I suffer, I’ll sometimes think it must mean that my present spiritual character is unprepared for worldly joy, that maybe I’d just grow too deceptively complacent, that I should thank God for keeping me on my toes and feeling the need to call on Him for help.

We can speculate that it may have partially to do with the fact that, in a corrupt and fallen world of sinners, goodness will be treated with opposition and revolt. That is, the extent of our sin probably matches the amount us humans by nature react with distaste for true good.

For example, a demon-possessed body isn’t supposed to feel pain from holy water, but it does, simply because its preference for evil is violently thwarted. For the demon, something which helps its spirit makes it suffer, while something damning its spirit seems pleasant.

And I know a good amount of my suffering stems from some event where my pride is damaged or something I unjustly desire is out of my hands. Then, if I’m lucky, I think: “Wait a minute. If the opposite had happened, I probably would’ve inflated my ego or grown spoiled with material comfort; and I really had no such right to what I wanted anyway. The most pain should be felt by wanting yet not receiving God, except He’s assured us that that’s the one thing entirely in our control – if we ask we shall receive – but I clearly don’t want that enough, or else I’d be a saint… Maybe this pain is a warning for me to never stop improving and working on my relationship with God.”

One thing I’m sure about is that we’ll never fully comprehend God’s Will when it comes to evil and suffering. The best response is always to respond with faith and prayer, acknowledging we have no right to demand our understanding it.

:thumbsup:wonderful post InSpiration! Peace, Carlan

InSpiration

 

[LogisticsBranch]

I asked this of the apologists, but I didn’t receive an answer, so I’ll ask here.

I have been through some horrible stuff in the past five years. It has broken me twice, and I have suffered so much that I attempted suicide.

I was talking to my priest about whether all that I had been through was “God’s Will.”

He said he didn’t necessarily think so. He said that God’s Will is that I love Him.

Hello BearingMy Cross. I agree with your priest. My main point is you need to talk to your doctor or mental health professionals in your community that can provide assistance and resources for you if you are still thinking of suicide. Hope you have done that.

Any person who talks about killing themselves needs help. Listening to the individual in a nonjudgmental manner and providing emotional support are important ways to help persons who are considering suicide. Enlisting the help of a doctor or a mental health professional is essential. Suicide prevention telephone lines and crisis centers have resources for friends and family, and for the person who has signs of suicidal behavior. Removing access
to firearms may be important to protect the person thinking of suicide, and other
persons as well. Assist anyone who talks about dying and having no reason to
live to seek help immediately.
SEEKING HELP
Talking to someone trained to listen to persons considering suicide can help. Your doctor
or mental health professionals in your community can provide assistance and resources
for you if you are thinking of suicide or if anyone you know is considering suicide. For
immediate help in the United States, call the life line (800/273-8255). Outside the
United States, access your local emergency service. (The Journal of the American Medical Association)jama.ama-assn.org/content/293/20/2558.full.pdf

 

[djeter]

I asked this of the apologists, but I didn’t receive an answer, so I’ll ask here.

I have been through some horrible stuff in the past five years. It has broken me twice, and I have suffered so much that I attempted suicide.

I was talking to my priest about whether all that I had been through was “God’s Will.”

He said he didn’t necessarily think so. He said that God’s Will is that I love Him.

So, my whole life I have been thinking that things happen for a reason . . . only now to find out that it is all arbitrary. That things just happen. There is no point. A path didn’t lead me to a place on purpose.

This negates everything I believed that gave purpose to my life. It gave me my sanity in the face of injustice, degredation, and suffering. I made me understand my lot in life. Don’t we all say, “It happened for a reason” or “It was his time to go” or “Only God knows why”? If it isn’t God’s Will, then everybody is clueless.

Now I find out that all God wants me to do is love Him?

I love Him, but how do I make sense of my suffering if He didn’t give it to me? and didn’t give it to for a purpose?

Have you ever read the Brothers Karamazov?

In the “Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima,” assembled by Alyosha Karamazov after his beloved Elder’s death, there occurs this extraordinary passage:

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and saved them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.

This passage is, as Victor Terras rightly says, “the master key to the philosophic interpretation, as well as to the structure,” of the entire Brothers Karamazov. For this passage elucidates two powerful and connected ideas:

1. that we can strongly (albeit obscurely) intuit the way wherein this empirical world of our actual lives is, in fact, rooted in the higher heavenly world of God; and
2. that what bears fruit in this world does so only when we nurture in our lives those three seeds that God has directly sowed in us, a nurturing that occurs when we fall to the ground and die so that these seeds may begin first to bud and then to bear fruit.

These two ideas, then, help us to understand why Dostoevsky chose as the epigraph to his novel this saying of Christ’s: *“Truly, truly I say to you, Unless the seed of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone; but if it die, it brings forth much fruit” *
(John 12:24).

What Florensky calls the victory over death is what Christ here describes as the way the seed bears fruit. This way of fruitfulness is the way of Memory Eternal.

Thus, we can see how both the artistic structure and the philosophic significance of the novel are held in these two ideas. We can see the three brothers, throughout the novel, drawing near to enacting these two ideas - or else missing them altogether or (with Ivan) deliberately turning away from them. And what connects these two ideas is, again, Memory Eternal, here understood as the way the seed genetically ‘remembers’ the fruit it springs from and will, if conditions are right, soon become.

True remembering is therefore directly connected to - indeed, hardwired into - the process wherein we die so as to enter into fruitfulness. And this process is the one of remembering God and of being remembered by Him.

More here on Doestoevsky and his novel:

payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/03/09/reading-selections-from-dostoevsky-and-memory-eternal-by-donald-sheehan/

and check out the category **Understanding Dostoevsky **for much more on this most Christian writer. Great narratives that put our world into perspective.

dj

 

[fhansen]

I asked this of the apologists, but I didn’t receive an answer, so I’ll ask here.

I have been through some horrible stuff in the past five years. It has broken me twice, and I have suffered so much that I attempted suicide.

I was talking to my priest about whether all that I had been through was “God’s Will.”

He said he didn’t necessarily think so. He said that God’s Will is that I love Him.

So, my whole life I have been thinking that things happen for a reason . . . only now to find out that it is all arbitrary. That things just happen. There is no point. A path didn’t lead me to a place on purpose.

This negates everything I believed that gave purpose to my life. It gave me my sanity in the face of injustice, degredation, and suffering. I made me understand my lot in life. Don’t we all say, “It happened for a reason” or “It was his time to go” or “Only God knows why”? If it isn’t God’s Will, then everybody is clueless.

Now I find out that all God wants me to do is love Him?

I love Him, but how do I make sense of my suffering if He didn’t give it to me? and didn’t give it to for a purpose?

God knows every hair on your head-and everything you’ve been through and everything you will go through. His grace is not simply a shotgun load of love and blessings, cast out there to whomever is willing to receive it. God the Holy Spirit is alive and operative within us always. And while we can resist His life and grace we can be sure He’s there nonetheless, offering comfort, counsel, and instruction through it all, tailoring his grace to our personalities, our misfortunes, our life-experiences in general -all to help draw us to full relationship with Him ultimately.

 

[TimothyH]

I have been through some horrible stuff in the past five years. It has broken me twice, and I have suffered so much that I attempted suicide.

I love Him, but how do I make sense of my suffering if He didn’t give it to me? and didn’t give it to for a purpose?

Your suffering has a purpose when it is united to the suffering of Christ. It has redemptive value when you realize in faith, that life is not perfect, Christ suffered on the cross and give that suffering, through Mary, to Jesus.

We are all one body and when you suffer, we all suffer.

Mainstream Catholicism seems to have lost the idea of redumptive suffering as part of the Body of Christ.

-Tim-

 

[hazcompat]

Gods’ will is that none should perish, but that all shall be saved.

peace