Continuing with the beautiful chapter on love and the will
of God from Garrigou-Lagrange, one sees the movement of holiness coming from
God, in His perfect will and in His love.
I think it is worth quoting him at length, as I do not want
to miss any of the jewels in his paragraphs.
Some may be a repetition, but no one can over-meditate or
contemplate in active contemplation on the love of God.
“We are love by God
far more than we think. To realize the extent of his love for us, we should
have to know fully the value of grace when it has reached its final development
in the glory of heaven; we would have to see God, if only for an instant.”
This seeing God for an instant occurs at our particular
judgment. So, we are condemned by love, or we are saved in love.
Aquinas continues…”for, since He is the source of all
goodness, one thing would not be better than another, did He not love it with a
great love”. (Ia, q.20, a.3)
The characteristics of God’s love are that it is universal, free, a manifestation of goodness
and invincible.
All these characteristics lead to the predilection of God’s
will. God calls sinners, us, over and over and over, in His love.
Our wills must be conformed to the divine will and to love,
as Garrigou-Lagrange notes, again referring to Aquinas. Two aspects of God’s
will provide us with the understanding of how to come into union with Him, the
goal of perfection.
These two aspects are “the
divine will of expression”. Let me let Garrigou-Lagrange explain this: “By the divine will of expression, we mean
all those external signs that reveal God’s will—command, prohibitions, the
spirit underlying the counsels, and everything that happens by His will or
permission. The divine will thus expressed, especially in commands, comes
within the domain of obedience, and as St. Thomas remarks, is what we refer to
when we say in the Our Father, ‘Thy will be done.’”
Let me stop here for a moment and unpack this in light of
the Mass of April 12th.
Our Lady Mary was completely obedient from birth because of
her unique grace. All the commands, prohibitions, and the counsels of poverty,
chastity and obedience were perfected in her. She totally followed the divine
will of expression. Here is the Collect of that day.
“O God, Who didst make
the blessed Virgin Mary surpass all creatures as perfect partaker and image of
Christ’s interior virtues, grant, we pray, that we may so venerate Mary’s
interior life as to become through her conformed to Christ and through Him
perfectly united to Thee. Through the same our Lord.”
This Collect describes the way of perfection perfectly. This
prayer refers to the interior virtues which led Mary to live in the divine will of expression.
The second aspect of God’s will, “the divine will of pleasure”, is, Garrigou-Lagrange writes, “…the interior act of God’s will, which
often is not yet revealed or expressed externally. Upon it depends our still
uncertain future—future events, future joys and trials, whether of long or
short duration, the hour and circumstances of our death, and so on. As St.
Francis of Sales remarks and Bossuet after him, whereas the expressed will of
God is the domain of obedience, the will of His good pleasure is the domain of
obedience, the will of His good pleasure is the domain of trusting
surrender….in making our will conform daily to the divine will as expressed, we
must for the rest abandon ourselves in all confidence to the divine will of
good pleasure, for we are certain beforehand that it wills nothing, permits
nothing, unless for the spiritual and eternal welfare of those who love God,
and persevere in that love.”
God’s love for us is sheer generosity. “O, Generous Love,”
as Cardinal Newman writes in “The Dream of Gerontius”.
God states, as the Dominican author reminds us, “ You have
not chosen me…but I have chosen you” (John 15:16).
How wonderful, how beautiful…how loving, how kind.
More later…much more