Seeking Quiet for the Will

"The virtue of charity brings quiet to our will, so that we only want what we have, and thirst for nothing beyond that" (Dante's Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto III, 70-72).

There is so much in life that I don't have. I'm not rich. I don't have a 4.0 (or a degree from Oxford). I'm not best friends with every person in the world. My faith is incomplete at best. My life is not perfectly peaceful. But why should all that disrupt the peace that is there?

I've been far too sensitive to the things I don't have these days. It's not so much possessions as it is abstract things that are harder to quantify. Even worse, I create super-lofty criteria and unnecessarily high/tough standards that are realistically impossible to meet. The result: disappointment and disruption of peace. The delusion: that imperfect peace is ok and that it's the best I can do.

The reality: thinking everything is fine and ain't getting better is garbage, and to quote a friend of mine, "if you're not moving forward, you're going backwards". Wait, but what about contentment in what one has? It appears this boils down to another case of moderation, finding the balance point between two ends, which is basically the story of my spiritual journey.

Right now, my balance is way too tilted toward focusing on the not, the missing, and that is too dominant. The work against complacency is what keeps us/me moving forward. The source of imbalance in my case, and probably many others, is an error in the end sought. My focus had shifted too much off Christ.

My faith is not passing through any raised intensity of doubt or thinness, but the centrality of Christ was waning to make Christ too incidental to the daily's of life. Or, in the cases where He remained foremost, it had become too much of a company line--as with discernment, where I've reached such clarity amid the unsureness that I have it down too much to a pre-fabricated response.

The answer: reorienting. Having the ability to drag myself onto a self-made retreat is a gift I am blessed to have from being on so many wonderful retreat experiences, and I was able to have that time today before the Lord in Adoration. I love the variety of ways one can be before Christ, especially in physicalities: looking right into the monstrance, bowing/burying one's head, blocking out the rest of the room around your eyes to only see the Eucharist, kneeling down, prostration, etc.

I went with Christ on retreat, going into my prayer knowing that getting away from thought (more objective, personally/internally originated processes) and entering reflection and prayer (concretely including God by addressing Him, considering His will, considering Christ's response) would calm the choppy waters within. It would spread the peace wider and deeper.

I, like any other, struggle to let God speak, but after my half hour, I knew the answer was asking Christ to follow me out of the chapel and beat my self-constructed criteria to the punch. I need Christ to be within more than ever to remind me of what is and can be before I focus on what is not. It is in re-grounding it all in love and presence that the sometimes-interrupted peace becomes more pervasive again. The only thing I know I heard God say was in response to my concluding prayer of thanks: He said, "You're welcome."

I cannot get too low when I have Christ with me, but I had pushed Him to the sidelines too much. I am happy every day, but the blips on my radar were increasing in frequency and intensity to distract me from feeling the joy therein. Christ is at the helm much more now, and my prayer is that I can keep Him there bigger and better than before.

Ultimately, God's will is our peace (also Dante). So if we tap into His will, we reach our peace. And by virtue of His love, we find satisfaction in what we have and seek in right proportion and manner to maximize the love there, wanting nothing more than God, who is Love.

Note: I'll pick up the ministry discussion later on sometime, perhaps during a break when I can start reading The Godbearing Life again.