Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Every moment of life on earth plants something in your soul. Just as the wind carries thousands of seeds. So too, each moment brings germs of spiritual vitality that discreetly come to rest in the spirits of individuals. Advertisers know this as they bombard us with repetitive advertising. Yet, most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost because men are not prepared to receive them. Such seeds as these ones that can lead to spiritual vitality, cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. 

This is no new idea. Christ, in the parable of the Sower, long ago told us that “The seed is the word of God.” This is not only for words formally preached in churches (if it so happens to be preached there.) Yet, every expression of the will of God is in some sense a “word” of God and therefore a “seed” of new life. The ever-changing reality in which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God. Such dialogue is not continuous “talk,” or the frivolous conversational form of effective prayer commonly cultivated in evangelical communities. Rather, it is a dialogue of love and of choice – a dialogue of deep wills. 

In all the situations of life the “will of God” comes to us not merely as a dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love. Common among monks and teenagers, the conventional conception of “God’s will” is an arbitrary force. It bears on us with a hostility that leads one to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair. Perhaps it often is, itself, the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration. These arbitrary “dictates” of a domineer­ing and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in both meditation and contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from His Face forever. So much depends on our idea of God – God as an “it” rather than God as “Thou”! Yet no idea of God, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express God in reality. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about God. 

We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation and seeks our good. God’s immense and unfathomable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread it. But when we understand the dialectic of life and death, we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality. 

The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a Godly desire. For how can I receive the seeds of free­dom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with an opposite desire? God’s liberty cannot be planted in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in the desire for the things that I hate, and I have hardened my heart against true love. I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me. I must learn to “leave myself” in order to find myself by yielding to the love of God. By seeking God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of God’s life that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest. 

For it is God’s love that warms me in the sun and God’s love that sends the cold rain. It is God’s love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. It is the love of God that sends the days when I am sick, and the days of health when I labor, and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God Who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood. His love spreads the shade of the coconut tree over my head and sends the bucket of fresh spring water. It is God’s love that speaks to me in the birds and streams; but also, behind the clamor of the city God speaks to me in both judgment and discernment, and all these things are seeds sent to me by God’s will and grace. 

If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if God’s will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that God is, and my harvest would be God’s glory and my own joy.  

And I would grow together with thousands and mil­lions of other freedoms into the green and gold of one huge field praising God, loaded with increase, loaded with natural abundance. If in all things I consider only the heat and the cold, the food or the hunger, the sickness or labor, the beauty or pleasure, the success and failure or the material good or evil my works have won for my own will, I will find only emptiness and not happiness. I shall not be fed; I shall not be full. For my food is the will of the One who made me and who made all things in order to give God’s own self to me through them. 

My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom-still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: “Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can return love to God and give myself with it. For in giving myself, I shall find God and God is life everlasting.” 

By consenting to God’s will with joy and doing it with gladness I have the Highest love in my heart, because my will is now the same as God’s love and I am on the way to becoming what He is, who is Love. And by accepting all things from God I receive God’s joy into my soul, not because things are what they are but because God is Who He is, and God’s love has willed my joy in them all. The Sabbath is indeed made for human beings.

How am I to know the will of God? Even where there is no other more explicit claim on my obedience, such as a legitimate command, the very nature of each situation usually bears written into itself some indication of God’s will. For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God. To consent to His will is, then, to consent to be authentic, or to speak and act truth, or at minimum, seek it. To obey God is to respond to God’s will expressed in the need of another person, or at least to respect the rights of others. For the right of another man is the expression of God’s love and God’s will. 

The requirements of a work to be done can be under­stood as the will of God. If I am supposed to hoe a garden, teach a class, or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become God’s instrument. God works through me. When I act as His instrument my labor cannot become an obstacle to contemplation, even though it may temporarily so occupy my mind that I cannot engage in it while I am doing my job. Yet my work itself will purify and pacify my mind and dispose me for contemplation. 

We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation and seeks our good. God’s immense and unfathomable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread it. But when we understand the dialectic of life and death, we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality. 

If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if God’s will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that God is, and my harvest would be God’s glory and my own joy. 

And I would grow together with thousands and mil­lions of other freedoms into the green and gold of one huge field praising God, loaded with increase, loaded with natural abundance. If in all things I consider only the heat and the cold, the food or the hunger, the sickness or labor, the beauty or pleasure, the success and failure or the material good or evil my works have won for my own will, I will find only emptiness and not happiness. I shall not be fed; I shall not be full. For my food is the will of the One who made me and who made all things in order to give God’s own self to me through them. 

My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom-still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: “Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can return love to God and give myself with it. For in giving myself, I shall find God and God is life everlasting.” 

By consenting to God’s will with joy and doing it with gladness I have the Highest love in my heart, because my will is now the same as God’s love and I am on the way to becoming what He is, who is Love. And by accepting all things from God I receive God’s joy into my soul, not because things are what they are but because God is Who He is, and God’s love has willed my joy in them all. The Sabbath is indeed made for human beings.

The requirements of a work to be done can be under­stood as the will of God. If I am supposed to hoe a garden, teach a class, or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become God’s instrument. God works through me. When I act as His instrument my labor cannot become an obstacle to contemplation, even though it may temporarily so occupy my mind that I cannot engage in it while I am doing my job. Yet my work itself will purify and pacify my mind and dispose me for contemplation. 

Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly. He may permit that through no fault of our own we may have to work madly and distractedly, due to our sins, and to the sins of the society in which we live. In that case we must tolerate it and make the best of what we cannot avoid. But let us not be blind to the distinction between sound, healthy work and unnatural toil. 

In any case, we should always seek to conform to the logos or truth of the duty before us, the work to be done, or our own God-given nature. Contemplative obedience and abandonment to the will of God can never mean a cultivated indifference to the natural values implanted by Him in human life and work. Insensitivity must not be confused with detachment. The contemplative must certainly be detached, but he can never allow himself to become insensible to true human values, whether in society, in other men or in himself. If he does so, then his contemplation stands condemned as vitiated in its very root.