Welcome back to another issue of The Churchyard, the weekly gathering place for readers of The Peasant Times-Dispatch.
The Churchyard is for you—or rather, it’s for us. This is the place where we peasants gather, coming and going as convenient for us, sharing the news of the day, asking for prayers and offering to pray. Want to talk about theology? Read some noteworthy headline? Have a life event you’d like to share? The community here are proven prayer warriors so we’d love to talk to you about it.
The Times-Dispatch is all about trying to reduce anxiety about the world leveraging the peasantly lens, so if you are feeling troubled, we are here to pray for you and try to share some real world wisdom for the real world life of being Catholic layfolk.
Last Month: I shuffled around my schedule! I posted a Letter From The Editor! I’m making moves and getting back on the horse!
This Month: This month I am thinking about how to understand God’s Will. I know a few basics: God has an ACTIVE WILL, which says “Moses it’s time to get a move on.” God has a PERMISSIVE WILL, which is where God permits the consequences of the fallen world. The confusion of these two gets us to most high-school level Problem Of Evil debates. “If God was good why did he let [some bad thing] happen?” God IS good, and God didn’t ordain from heaven that you lose your wallet (or substitute any other kind of bad thing). God permits these things to happen because in order to have Free Will we need a wide space around us.
But recognizing this still flies in the face of human experience. We know people talk about praying and—wouldn’t you know it—a miracle has happened! Money fell out of the sky! So and so was cured! We pray that St. Anthony intercede for us in little miracles like these all the time when we lose our keys (or our wallets). We know human level miracles are possible, AND that human level miracles are not obligatory. I’m NOT Moses, why would God help me find my wallet?
How do we square this incongruity?
I don’t have a clean answer for you. I wrestle with this every day. I am especially prone to believe that I have somehow lost God’s favor and that explains why these things have happened to me. But it’s not God’s favor or disfavor that governs our quotidian trials—it’s the fallen order of life, that we live in a fallen world where original sin is the first rule of play. I try, moment to moment, to thank God for the good things, and to shrug off bad things as just rotten luck.
But we know this fallen, earthly order isn’t all there is. The eternity of heaven should be some consolation for us. All that sowing in tears we’ve done here, we will reap in joy in the here-after. We will be perfectly known, and also perfectly know. And we will never again question the presence of God because we will be in that presence forever.
And that makes all this earthly stuff seem like chump change, if you can wrap your head around it.
How do you understand God’s will in your life? How do you handle the seeming incongruity of God’s goodness and earthly fallenness?
As always—what are your 🌹 Roses and/or 🐝 Thorns from this past month? How can we pray for each other in the month ahead? What are your intentions we can keep in our prayer this month? Which Saints have caught your attention? Let us know in the comments! 👇
God bless you!
AJPM
Thanks! Yes, confession always helps and can definitely reframe things in a healthier way. Prayers as always.
It's a conundrum, to be sure. I have been working on accepting everything that happens as an expression of God's will for a long time and slowly but surely it has changed me. It can affect your view of an unpleasant event; "sure that was horrible, but I learned xxxx", but it can also change your whole mindset. This last week has been exceptionally busy for me; lots of demands on my time, lots of clients wanting chunks of my time I didn't really want to give, including a call to New York which was inconveniently late in the day for me! But I am slowly learning to embrace these things; I did get a phenomenal amount of work doen and while I am tired, I handled it much better than I would have done before - no grumbling or resentment. The other way I look at things is probably a result of being old (not like you!); the patterns of your past life start to form clearer outlines. While I can see the consequences of my sins very clearly, I can also see what God made out of them, the lessons learned. He permitted me to make these bad choices in free will, but brought good out of them. I can do things now professionally and personally through my past experiences - the difficulties I had years ago led along a winding path to what I do for a living now. All of that is God's will, as long as we try to follow it. Hope this makes sense, I'm rambling, I know.