I Am Not Providence

The Violence of Trying to Arrange What Belongs to God

“In returning and rest you shall be saved;

in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”

— Isaiah 30:15

There comes a moment in the spiritual life when one discovers that surrender to God is far more demanding than sacrifice for God.

We may give Him our time. We may give Him our possessions. We may embrace asceticism, prayer, solitude, obedience, service. We may endure losses we never imagined we could bear. And yet beneath all of this there can remain one possession fiercely guarded:

the future.

We want to know where the road is leading.

More than this, we want to make certain that it leads somewhere.

And perhaps nowhere is this temptation more subtle than in the life of one who sincerely desires God. We are not necessarily trying to build a worldly kingdom. We may be trying to discern a vocation, preserve a ministry, serve the Church, find the place where we can give ourselves most completely to God. The object of our concern may be holy.

But holy things can still be grasped.

We can seek God’s will while quietly insisting that He reveal it according to our timetable. We can speak of discernment while continually rearranging the pieces of our lives. We can pray for guidance while constructing alternative futures in our imagination. We can tell ourselves that we are being responsible when in fact we have become terrified of allowing God to be God.

The Desert Fathers understood the violence hidden within this.

They fled into the desert not because they had discovered a reliable method for constructing a holy life, but because they wanted to become poor enough to receive one.

The desert stripped them of the illusion that life could be secured.

There were no guarantees there.

No carefully managed future.

No ecclesiastical career to protect.

No reputation that could tell them who they were.

No visible fruit by which they could reassure themselves that their lives mattered.

There was the cell.

There was the heart.

There was the Name.

There was God.

And slowly a human being learned the terrible freedom contained in the words:

I am not Providence.

This is one of the hardest truths for the religious heart to accept.

We would readily confess that God created the heavens and the earth. Yet we behave as though the small portion of creation entrusted to us cannot possibly survive unless we continually supervise it.

We anticipate conversations that have not occurred.

We prepare defenses against accusations that have not been made.

We construct paths around obstacles that do not yet exist.

We imagine doors opening and doors closing.

We rehearse losses.

We calculate possibilities.

We ask what will happen to our vocation, our ministry, our community, our work, those whom we love.

And all the while God remains where He has always been:

here.

The Fathers continually drag us back to this poverty.

Stay in your cell.

Do the work before you.

Guard the heart.

Remember God.

Do not wander.

Do not give yourself over to thoughts.

These sayings can sound almost unbearably simple until one realizes what they demand. They forbid us from living imaginary lives.

Much of our suffering comes not from the cross God has actually given us but from the thousand crosses we manufacture while attempting to anticipate tomorrow.

The mind races ahead.

Grace does not.

Grace waits for us in the present.

This is why the elders speak so relentlessly about thoughts. A thought about the future may appear perfectly reasonable. But entertain it long enough and an entire world arises within us—a world in which God has strangely disappeared and everything depends upon our decisions.

Then anxiety becomes inevitable.

Because we have unconsciously assumed responsibility for Providence.

We are trying to carry something that belongs to God alone.

St. Porphyrios continually turned souls away from anxious self-preoccupation toward Christ. Do not wrestle endlessly with the darkness. Turn toward the light. Love Christ. Let the soul become occupied with Him.

St. Silouan learned the same mystery through terrible spiritual suffering. His peace did not come from understanding what God was doing with his life. It came through entrusting himself utterly to God while descending into the deepest poverty of heart.

St. Sophrony would later show that such self-emptying is not passivity. It is the very form of Christ’s life.

Christ does not seize.

Christ receives.

Christ entrusts Himself to the Father.

Even before the Cross, in Gethsemane, we see the final surrender of every human attempt to determine the shape of salvation:

Not my will, but Yours.

We repeat these words easily.

To live them is crucifixion.

Because sometimes God’s Providence does not resemble providence.

Sometimes the road disappears.

Sometimes a vocation seems suspended.

Sometimes institutions fail us.

Sometimes people upon whom we depended vanish from our lives.

Sometimes years of labor appear to produce very little.

Sometimes every reasonable path forward closes.

And the temptation then becomes overwhelming:

I must find a way.

Perhaps.

But perhaps the deeper word is:

Remain.

There is a kind of action that springs from faith, and there is a kind of action that springs from terror. Externally they may look identical. Only the heart knows the difference.

One acts because love calls.

The other acts because silence has become unbearable.

One responds to what God has placed before it.

The other continually tries to force tomorrow into existence.

The distinction is everything.

The spiritual life eventually brings us to places where intelligence cannot save us. Experience cannot save us. Connections cannot save us. Planning cannot save us. Even our understanding of vocation cannot save us.

We stand before God without a map.

And something within us cries out for one.

The desert answers:

You have Christ.

What else were you expecting?

This is the fierce mercy of the desert.

It takes away our imagined right to know.

Abraham went out not knowing where he was going.

Israel entered a wilderness where food could not be stored against tomorrow.

The apostles left their nets without being shown the architecture of their future.

Mary received a word that would overturn her entire existence and answered only:

Let it be to me according to your word.

None was given control.

Each was given God.

Perhaps this is why uncertainty can become such a profound school of prayer.

When the future remains unresolved long enough, eventually there is nothing left to say.

At first we ask God to open this door.

Then another.

We ask Him to clarify.

To intervene.

To vindicate.

To restore.

To show us what we are supposed to do.

These prayers are not wrong.

But beneath them another prayer may slowly emerge, much poorer and much more dangerous:

Lord Jesus Christ, I give You the right to determine what my life will become.

Not merely the right to assist my plans.

Not merely the right to bless the path I have discerned.

Not merely the right to choose between the possibilities I have presented to Him.

The right to lead where I have not imagined.

The right to close what I wanted opened.

The right to leave unanswered what I desperately want resolved.

The right even to make my life fruitful in ways I may never see.

This is faith.

And it feels remarkably like death.

The old man within us wants to know that everything will work out. Faith asks something far more radical: whether God will be enough even when we do not know what working out means.

The Fathers did not go into the desert to master uncertainty.

They went there to be mastered by God.

Perhaps that is why their words remain so piercing in an age obsessed with planning, strategy, visibility, outcomes and control. We have learned to manage almost everything except our own hearts.

The desert offers another way.

Do what love requires today.

Pray the prayer that has been given to you.

Care for the person standing before you.

Keep vigil.

Repent.

Forgive.

Receive your daily bread.

And leave tomorrow where Christ Himself told us to leave it:

with the Father.

There may indeed come a day for decisions.

A door may open.

A word may be spoken.

A path may become clear.

When it does, walk through it.

But do not create tomorrow merely because you cannot bear today’s poverty.

There are seasons when remaining is itself obedience.

There are moments when not knowing is the very place where God is teaching us to know Him.

There are paths that become visible only beneath the feet of the person walking them.

And perhaps one of the purest prayers a human being can finally offer is also one of the simplest:

I am not Providence.

I do not have to hold my life together.

I do not have to foresee its ending.

I do not have to make God’s promises come true.

I do not have to force fruit from the soil.

I do not even have to understand what He is doing.

I have only to remain with Him.

And when tomorrow finally arrives, Providence will already be there.