JMJT! Praise be Jesus Christ! Now and Forever!
As the hot summer days beat down upon us amidst continued challenges of the Covid-19 worldwide pandemic, civil unrest, and strife amongst family members and within the Church itself, it can be a good time to check in on my level of consent and surrender.
A few weeks ago, I shared my four-step offering at the beginning of each day which consists of consent, embrace, entrust and consecrate.[CEEC] I describe my consent as a surrender to all that God has for me this present day, all that has happened in my past, and all that He desires to do with me and in my life in the future. It is a full abandonment to His Divine Will, with the added interior directive that no wrestling matches are allowed!
This interior calling to consent in each present moment was a result of many years of trying to control God's Will and hold on to my own desires and plans. Yes, I was walking with the Lord and in relationship with Him, but I still desperately wanted to have things my way. When things did not go according to my well-laid plans, I either flirted with downright despair and hopelessness or threw an interior fit and felt perfectly justified in advising God as to why His plans were unacceptable to me, subpar, a bad idea, and just downright unacceptable. This is the ugly truth of the matter.
In God's infinite Divine Mercy and Wisdom, He continued to gently abide with me and bring more opportunities for me to practice childlike surrender in little and big ways. In family life, there were (and continue to be) countless opportunities to forego my agenda and enter into the flow of the moment and what love is calling me to do. These invitations to give my fiat would spill over into other arenas of my life including work, friendships, and my spiritual life. Probably the most dramatic of all opportunities to consent was when I suffered from a debilitating illness on two different occasions for about 18 months the first time and over two years the next time. I call this my imprisonment experience because I felt trapped in my body as I could not control how I would feel on a daily basis and could not do much. In other words, I could not perform and earn His love. I was stripped down to being and not doing, and it was humbling indeed. I fought God tooth and nail, explaining to Him how unfair this was, and how I could not possibly do anything for His Kingdom or my family while sitting in bed everyday in incredible pain unable to think much or move. I felt angry and abandoned. I felt supremely misunderstood and that I was not valued or cherished as God's daughter, but instead that I was a profound disappointment to Him. I felt like a burden upon my family. To say that this was a profound spiritual crisis for me would be an understatement.
The turning point came after many months when I finally consented to God's invitation to let myself be loved and to accept God's Will in the present moment amidst the suffering and loss of my dreams and plans. It was pure grace for me to be able to slowly stop negotiating and bargaining with God, and to instead consent to whatever His plans for me might be as mysterious and difficult as they were.
Fr. Jacques Philippe speaks of this life-changing consent quite eloquently in his book Interior Freedom. He explains that there is a difference between choosing and consenting. Yes, we are sometimes free to choose that which we wish and desire, but there are many things in life beyond our control like where we were born, under what circumstances, our family members, our race and nationality. He purports that the exercise of freedom is perfected and becomes heroic when we consent to what we did not originally choose.
"The highest and most fruitful form of human freedom is found in accepting, even more than in dominating...In order to become truly free, we are often called to choose to accept what we did not want, and even what we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here: one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!
To achieve interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on...the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control! With consent, even though the objective reality remains the same, the attitude of our hearts is very different. They already contain the virtues of faith, hope, and love in embryo, so to speak." [p. 28-29]
Fr. Walter Ciszek, SJ discovered this interior freedom in the midst of spending some twenty-three years in Soviet prison camps of Siberia in a situation he obviously did not choose! At first, he fought God and lectured him on how mistaken and faulty this entire situation was and how it must change. No change came. Fr. Ciszek agonized over how God could have allowed this and why. How could his isolation, abuse and imprisonment possibly be a part of God's plans for him? He finally surrendered and consented into the here and now and accepted that "life is not what he expected it to be." Amidst this truth, he recognized that the "here and now, at this moment - truly constitute the will of God. The challenge is in learning to accept this truth and act upon it, every moment of every day." [He Leadeth Me, p. 40].
He further describes this interior freedom as belonging only to those "who accepted the bitter loss of freedom...The body can be confined, but nothing can destroy the deepest freedom in man, the freedom of soul,and the freedom of mind and will. These are the highest and noblest faculties in man, they are what make him the sort of man he is, and they cannot be constrained. Even in prison, a man can choose to do good or evil, to fight for survival or to despair, to serve God and others or to turn inward and selfish. Free will remains and so freedom remains, for freedom is simply defined as the state of being free, not coerced by necessity or fate or circumstances in one's choices or actions." [p. 156]
St. Therese recognizes on her deathbed that "Everything is grace, everything is the direct effect of our Father’s love – difficulties, contradictions, humiliations, all the soul’s miseries, her burdens, her needs – everything, because through them, she learns humility, realizes her weakness. Everything is grace because everything is God’s gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events – to the heart that loves, all is well.” [Last Conversations]
When we consent and recognize that life is difficult and often not what we imagined it would be, we find interior peace because we allow for hope in the possibilities that flow directly from God and not from our self-sufficiency, willfullness, and ulterior motives. We are able to let go and allow the Holy Spirit, the "Wild Goose", to go where he wills and to take us on unforeseen adventures in the mind, heart and body. With our consent and realization that we are pilgrims on this earth and that our life is a profound gift filled with beauty, goodness and truth but also harsh, limited, finite and imperfect, we then become "able to be present to others selflessly and are free to be allocentric, to dwell reverently in loving acceptance of another..." and of ourselves. [Urgent Longings, Tyrrell p. 42]
To be present to God and to others in loving acceptance for the here and now opens us up to God's transformative love. In our current circumstances, whether you find yourself in a time of consolation or desolation, health or illness, war or peace, God is amidst it and with you. As Swedish mystic Hjalmar Ekstrom wrote, "The point is that where you are, in the very situations in which you find yourself, he is there, his nearness to you is there and yours to him." [Ekstrom, Den Stilla Kammaren p. 55] He would further write to his wife during a time of personal crisis where he was consenting to what he did not understand, "God guides in everything, may we be secure and happy and with courage follow his paths." [Geels, p. 125] Furthermore, "With everything that happens in our life, with our life, with our sin and deficiency, with our sluggishness and foolishness - with everything, he draws us in [into the heavenly world] and we come in." When we accept sufferings,crosses, limitations and situations we do not like and would never choose, they become fruitful when united to the transformative power of Christ Crucified.
If we consent, we become content because we learn how to hope, depend and lean on the One who knows us and loves us infinitely. So instead of wrestling, "You do not need to try at all costs to come out of your situation. You can accept it, rest in it, open yourself to your anguish and pain, and meet God right in the center, in the center of your being. St. John of the Cross says that we can be in our center even if we are not yet in our deepest center. That is a consolation. Perhaps you are not even capable of this. Then you can rest in your inability to rest and abandon yourself." [Eternity in the Midst of Time, Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen, ocd p. 158-159] God uses it all. He sees all. He is with us.
In these present times of uncertainty, you and I can choose freedom of spirit or a spirit of anger and control. I am free to respond in love and consent to all that God allows to happen to me on this day at this time and this place or I can fight it and feel incredible tension and angst. Our Lady has shown us how to respond. Let us repeat with our Blessed Mother, "Let it be done to me according to thy word." Our consent will lead to being content and resting in the Lord. We will be truly free.
To Consent = To Be Content
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