22. The One Thing Necessary
The One Thing Necessary
The plant has nothing to “mind” now but the treasure it bears. Its aim has become absolutely simple. In the old carnal days there was the complexity of trying to carry on two lives at once, nourishing root and stem, leaf and flower and tendril, alongside the seed-vessel and seed. All that is over. It withdraws itself quietly into the inner shrine where God is working out that which is eternal.
A DEAR FRIEND IN HUNGARY has chosen the simple way over the complex. She writes, “My longing for a husband is there, but I offered it up to the Lord. Often I imagine a single future for myself. In fact, the presence of a man in my life would be an unexpected gift. Thank you for praying for me. I wouldn’t like to put my own imagined happiness before God’s greater glory.”
Another who is earnestly trying to learn that abandonment wrote, “I long for marriage and motherhood, but I also want to please God. Are these desires diametrically opposed?” I could not tell her that God would fulfill both, but I assured her there was nothing sinful in the desire for marriage and motherhood. It was perfectly human and normal, but like all our dreams of human happiness must be surrendered as the Hungarian girl’s were, to the one supreme aim: the glory of God, which always leads in the end to more than happiness—to fullness of joy, pleasures forevermore. If she could best glorify God by being married, she could be sure He would, in His time, give her a husband.
The Virgin Mary was one whose aim was absolutely simple. She is an icon of radiant simplicity, single-eyed, with nothing to “mind but to please her Master. When He sent His angel with an earth-shattering message, her answer was quick and unequivocal: yes.
Acceptance of the will of God is always a simple thing, though for us who are yet far from sainthood it is often not an easy thing. Our lives are still complicated, our aims mixed, our vision clouded. No wonder Jesus told us to consider the birds and the lilies. We spend much time in talk, we write books about deep things, but we miss seeing God’s little chickadee as he flits cheerily in the snow-laden evergreen, finding the seed God has put there for him. We rarely consider a bird in his precious simplicity—the chickadee, wearing his little black cap and gray suit, whistling tinily, doing nothing but what he was made to do.
I would like to do nothing but what I was made to do. I am sure this is what God intends. How shall I know what that is except in quietness? How listen if I am full of talk? I must cease the rehearsal of personal wants and feelings, willingly release things that seem important but in fact have nothing to do with my true goal. The itch to know and to have and to be anything other than what God intends me to know, to have, and to be must go.
This is a far cry from quietism. It may sound to some like an indolent and sluggish way of life, mere spiritual torpor, perhaps even the Eastern ideal of absence of desire. “And yet I do speak words of wisdom to those who are ripe for it,” wrote Paul, “not a wisdom belonging to this passing age, nor to any of its governing powers, which are declining to their end; I speak God’s hidden wisdom, his secret purpose framed from the very beginning, to bring us to our full glory” (1 Cor 2:6-7, italics mine).
If we truly believe that God wants to bring us to our full glory, we will long increasingly to unite our wills with His. It is in exact proportion as we do this that we will find happiness here on earth. If His will is done on earth, it becomes like heaven, where His will is always done.
“Happiness, Heaven itself, is nothing else but a perfect conformity, a cheerful and eternal compliance of all the powers of the soul with the Will of God” (Samuel Shaw, 1669).
When something interrupts what we are doing (the angel interrupted Mary’s housework, I suppose), we fret. As I write, two dear aged aunts, sisters, lie in the hospital. What will I do if one of them dies while I must be on a speaking trip? This is the sort of question that can quickly destroy my peace. God restores it when I review my goal: to please Him. Nothing except my own will can interrupt that. Nothing on earth. It is the only thing I must “mind,” and I am assured that He will enable me to mind it, no matter what. If Aunt Anne or Aunt Alice should die when the funeral would conflict with my commitment to speak, God is not taken by surprise, I do not doubt that He will make plain my duty when the time comes, and until then it is not my concern. We make our lives insupportably complex by disobeying Jesus’ command to take no thought for tomorrow. Planning for tomorrow, when planning is necessary and possible, belongs properly to today. Worrying about tomorrow belongs nowhere. The Lord gives us daily, not weekly, bread. He gives strength according to our days, not our years. The work, the suffering, the joy are given according to His careful measure.
And if I, who am perfectly well, am tempted to worry about the mere interruption of a few days’ schedule, what of the two aunts themselves and all others whose lives seem to have come to a screeching halt because of illness? Can they continue to fulfill the will of the Father, inert on a sickbed? Surely they can. “This illness will not end in death,” Jesus said when told that Lazarus was sick. “It has come for the glory of God” (Jn 11:4). Sickness—for the glory of God? Jesus could not have raised Lazarus from his grave and thus shown God’s glory if Lazarus had not been sick. The glory of God may be revealed through sick people in ways other than resurrection. Most of us have witnessed His glory in the forms of patience, serene trust, unselfishness, gratitude, and other divine graces in the ill, but even in the absence of such evidence we can trust Him to look after His own glory in His own way. The Father knows the frame and remembers that it is mere dust. His compassions never fail. His arms hold us when we are too weak to cling, His Spirit prays in us and for us in those groanings which never find words. His salvific work goes on when we feel like stragglers making not an inch of progress.
God’s message to Mary would have seemed to most engaged girls an enormous inconvenience, even a disaster. It caused her a moment of puzzlement (how could this be?), that was all. She raised no objections, no questions about what would happen to her or her fiancé. Her answer, fruit of perfect trust, came very simply, “Be it unto me according to Thy word.”
The word of the prophet Habakkuk may come to some of us when everything appears to have come to nothing, “Although the fig-tree does not burgeon, the vines bear no fruit, the olive-crop fails, the orchards yield no food, the fold is bereft of its flock and there are no cattle in the stalls, yet I will exult in the Lord and rejoice in the God of my deliverance” (Hb 3:17-18). It is amazing what praise can do when we’re in the bottom of the barrel, so to speak!
“This one thing I do” was Paul’s motto. He was always moving “with hands outstretched to whatever lies ahead” (Phil 314, JBP)—straight for the goal, to fulfill his calling. But what a great number of apparent setbacks he suffered! Prison, for example. When it was possible to avoid prison Paul avoided it. (Let no one take it that we are never to fight wrongs or disabilities or setbacks.) When there was no way to avoid it, he regarded it as no setback at all. He wrote to the Ephesians that they were not to lose heart because of this—in fact, they ought to feel honored, for to him had been entrusted the grace of carrying the gospel to the Gentiles. It would cost him something, but his being bound in prison chains did not in the least frustrate the purpose of God. We might say it was “par for the course,” the course of obedience, all taken into account in advance in God’s plans. As Corrie Ten Boom used to say, “God has no problems, only plans.” Paul referred to “the complex wisdom of God’s plan,” which angelic powers needed to see being worked out through the church, “in conformity to that timeless purpose which he centred in Christ Jesus, our Lord” (Eph 3:10-11, JBP). Consider those attentive angelic powers, spectators of us (for we Christians compose the church). Do we give thought to our vital part in the unfolding of the complex wisdom of God’s timeless purpose? While angels wait and watch, our part is to be simple—simply to trust, simply to obey, and leave the complexities to the Engineer of the universe.
Nothing would upset our equilibrium if our goal were pure and simple, as was Paul’s. When, as a prisoner, he was taken on a voyage across the Adriatic Sea, an angel stood beside him and told him not to be afraid, in spite of winds of hurricane force, for God would spare his life and the lives of all on board. Paul cheered his guards and fellow passengers with the good news, but the bad news was that they would have to run aground on some island (Acts 27:26).
It would seem that the God who promised to spare all hands might have “done the job right,” saved the ship too, and spared them the ignominy of having to make it to land on the flotsam and jetsam that was left. The fact is He did not, nor does He always spare us. Running aground is not the end of the world—sometimes it fits in very neatly with God’s running of the world. It certainly helps to make the world a bit less appealing to us, drawing our attention to a far better one. Even disaster cannot destroy the peace of one whose aim is absolutely simple.
It was not until years after my first bereavement that I heard about “grief work,” and studies of what were called the five stages of grief. I do not know whether these are considered necessary for all, but I suppose if I had heard of them I might have felt obliged to move consciously through each at that time. Perhaps my memory of the early months of my widow-hood is selective, but I am sure that in spite of very real grief God met me in ways psychology knows nothing about. He gave me peace which was quite beyond explanation, and at times an exuberance of joy that was, as Scripture confirms, “unspeakable.” Thomas à Kempis knew the simpler way, “a pure and whole forsaking of ourselves and of our own will, that we might get freedom of spirit.” One of his dialogues with God went like this:
My son, if thou wholly resign thyself into my hands and take nothing to thee again, thou shall have the more grace of me.
O Lord, how oft shall I resign me to thee, and in what things shall I forsake myself?
Always and in every hour, in great things and in small! I except nothing; for in all things I would find thee naked and poor, and void of thine own will. How mayst thou be mine and I thine, unless thou be clearly bereft of thy own will, within and without? And the sooner that thou canst bring it about, so much the sooner shall it be better with thee…. Resign thyself wholly to me and thou shalt have great inward peace” (Book III, Chapter 37).
The five stages of grief work may be unavoidable if we feel ourselves adrift in a universe without meaning, but may there not be some shortcuts to peace for those who truly believe in the Shepherd, and go gently with him through the Valley of the Shadow?