Number 196 - December 1999

Events

Father FINET

Alouette N° 196. Pages16-19

"Events, says God, are Me. It's Me who is caressing you or filing you down. But it's always Me! Each year, each hour, each event is Me. It's Me who is there, Me who is loving you, it's Me, don't be afraid." Charles Péguy.

Cardinal Suenens, in his book "A New Pentecost", wrote:
"The Spirit doesn't speak only in the silence of prayer. He speaks throughout all the history of mankind. He has a new language for each generation. To our own, He speaks through the prodigious enrichment of human knowledge; through the anguished and groping research of man confronted with questions which are no longer on a human scale; through the questions brought up by the very progress of science, and which make the masters of nuclear energy and atomic bombs tremble because of their possible consequences".

"The Spirit invites us" ­ Vatican Council II recalled this ­ "to scrutinize the signs of the time and to interpret them in the light of the Gospel". A priest who was asked how he prepared his Sunday sermons said: "I take the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, and I read the paper in the light of the word of God". It's the daily interpretation of events: God is there beckoning to us, in the form of a call, a duty, an emergency.

And Romano Guardini:
"The living God personally concerns Himself with each man in particular, and He is ready to take care of him. So it is a question neither of a tale, nor of a natural philosophy nor of ethics, but of a revelation born of divine liberty."

What is an event?

It's what happens to us, touches us, overturns the rhythm of our life (for example: the death of a father, a serious accident). In every event we must discover the light it brings us in the spiritual sense.

It changes our existence: failing an exam, unemployment, I can't refuse it, I can't brush it aside or run away from it.

"Events are our inner masters" wrote Emmanuel Mounier. An event is a call to faith: in every event, God is present. Everything is grace: health like sickness, success like failure.

Here is a quotation of Kierkegaard, a Danish Protestant and existentialist Christian: "Life is like a love letter written in a foreign language, and that one learns to decipher little by little. First the word for word of the letter, then the heart to heart. It's a question of learning to decipher through the events of our lives, this love letter which God addresses personally to us."

God is present in the baffling event, indistinct and mysterious.

When Augustine told his mother Monica that he intended leaving for Italy, Monica, overwhelmed, knowing the wild life of her son, fearing that in Milan he would stray even further away from God, passed the night in prayer on the beach of Carthage. In spite of that her son left. He met the Bishop of Milan, the future Saint Ambroise, who opened up the heart of the young man. It's in Milan that Augustine was to discover God.

And here is the commentary of Saint Augustine in his "Confessions": Lord, You refused her (my mother) what she asked You then, in order to grant even better the deep desire of her heart." (The conversion and sanctification of her son).

We mustn't be astonished faced with inexplicable events.

"Apart from sin, nothing happens without the will of God" St Francis of Sales.

In any event, we must always act according to human wisdom, but in line with the thought of God. All our human plans crumble and the Lord re-builds. It is a purification.

God is present in the apparently bad events. Meetings of Jesus with Mary Magdalene the sinful woman, with Zacheus the publican, and in a more extraordinary way with Saul, persecutor of the Church "breathing nothing but threats and slaughter with regard to the Lord's disciples". Acts. 9,1. ­ until the lament of Jesus on the road to Damascus: "Why are you persecuting Me?" Saul is turned upside down, baptized in Damascus by Anania, and becomes the great Saint Paul, apostle of the Gentiles and founder of numerous Christian communities to whom he was to write letters which have been kept as a precious treasure by the Church, and which permit to discover the depth of Jesus' teaching.

God doesn't want sin, but He uses it. Man never has the right to want something wrong in order to get something good out of it, but God can always use a wrong to draw good from it.

Saint Marguerite of Cortone, after having lived a very dissolute life, mistress for many years to a gentleman of Montepulciano, was miraculously drawn by the grace of God from her state of great sin, to such a point that she was able to write: "In the very mud where I was wallowing, the Lord came to look for me."

God reveals Himself in events. My existence is a workshop where God is at work.

All these considerations invite us to pray. For prayer is the support of faith. This free gift we have received at Baptism and which we must develop afterwards by the fidelity of our prayer. So many baptized young people, brought up in Christian families, lose their faith during their adolescence because they have neglected prayer. In addition, this faith helps us to receive events, that is to say the presence of God in our lives.

" When one really keeps one's heart open and available to God, then there are no circumstances in life which we cannot accept as a grace and a blessing. Of course for that, it needs a heart which is humble, a heart which is available, submissive and obedient. But couldn't we ask God for that? Couldn't we pray, instead of complaining? Call on God instead of accusing others? Every person has, somewhere in his life, a wound which hasn't yet healed. For we would be saints, yes really saints in the true sense of the word, if we were in every situation and from every point of view in agreement with God and with His will. But as we aren't, we are all concerned by the parable of the Christian's celestial ability. It's enough to look at our life a bit more closely to find that, here and there in our life there are situations, circumstances and charges that we can only see and dominate if, by the grace of God, we are intelligent enough, with e Heavenly intelligence, to recognize that, there too, God is expressing a word of His eternal love, and that we should say yes, with courage and submission". Karl Rahner.

And as Pope John-Paul II said to the young at Lourdes:
"Mary, teach us to pray. Like Mary, let us allow ourselves to be inhabited by the fire of the Holy Spirit. Many of us have re-discovered the joy of prayer: thinking of God and loving Him. Praising Him together and listening to His Word. Prayer is not first and foremost to satisfy ourselves. It is a dispossession of ourselves in order to put ourselves at the disposition of the Lord, letting Him pray within us.

It is the respiration of the Church, which puts it on the wave-length of God. It constitutes an essential service in the Church, the service of praise, and the service which permits mankind to open up to the Redeemer. It is at the source and at the outcome of our commitment. May we never separate action from contemplation. And may our prayers converge towards the Eucharist, where Christ Himself seizes our life to offer it with His own and to make it bear fruit".

Thus, through the teaching of our Holy Father the Pope, we see clearly that prayer helps us to live and receive events.