We enter into one of the most disconcerting chapters about God: his essential gratuity. As a consequence, his initiatives of grace with us are unpredictable. And as a first measure, we need to have a lot of patience in our relationship with God.
Hence, those emotions are gifts that the Father offers once in a while. But the gift is not merited, it is not earned, it is not achieved, nor is it even requested. It is received. It is given freely and received freely.
It is said that patience is the art of waiting. I prefer to think that it is the art of knowing, because one waits for what one knows.
But what do we know? That we and God are in different orbits. Among us in our human relationships, the laws of proportionality function. For such a cause, such an effect. For such an action, such a reaction. For so much work, so much reward. These are calculations of probability, psychological constants…
In life with God these laws do not function. At the moment least expected, it occurs to Him to pay the same wage to a person who works ten hours as to the one who worked two. No one can question this and ask Him: “Where is equal justice or the law of proportionality?”
The Lord would respond: “My children, you cannot ask me those questions because I gave the same to the one who worked for two hours as to the one who worked for ten. It was not a salary, but I gift that I gave to them, and whatever is mine I can do with as I consider suitable. For the rest, this is my Kingdom where nothing is paid because nothing is earned. Nothing is rewarded because nothing is merited. In this my Kingdom, only one verb is used, the verb give. Everything is a gift, everything is given. In your world there is only one verb: receive; everything is mercy, grace.”
Even the words of God in the Bible may sound capricious: “I give grace to whomever I give grace, I have mercy upon whom I have mercy.” It is a way of expressing a truth in an apparently simplistic manner, but in the final analysis, quite ingenious at the hour of defining gratuitousness. Gratuitousness is like that; with neither heads nor tails; with neither logic nor predictability. Those who seek me will find me, but not when they wish, as they wish or in the way that they wish.
You make the decision to live a desert: five hours of silence and solitude with the Lord in the midst of the heart of nature. The first four hours were aridity and dryness, and the last forty-five minutes the Lord manifested himself with all the splendor of his glory.
In another desert, during the first hour you had a divine inundation in a sea of delight, and then on the other hand felt pure fatigue and aridity during the remaining hours.
You had a classic retreat of six days, and they were six days of drowsiness and half-heartedness. On Thursday of the following week, when you were buying vegetables in the supermarket, the Lord manifested Himself with such splendor that it left you blinded for the rest of your life…
He is like that: disconcerting, unpredictable because He is gratuitousness. You have to have a lot of patience with God. Those who seek Him will find Him, but not when they wish, as the wish, nor how they wish.
Those who want to take God seriously better prepare themselves to patiently sit before the threshold of his door awaiting his silences, absences and delays.
God takes a person and carries Him all of His life, through the arid sands of the desert. He takes another person and leads Him through the oceans of tenderness. He takes another person, and in the middle of his/her life, manifest Himself with one of those “visitations” that leaves him/her marked forever. He takes another person and gives him/her none of the above, but infuses him/her with sensitivity for the divine so great that he/she cannot live without God. He takes yet another person and grants him/her constancy so tenacious that he/she remains faithful until death. He does not repeat himself! For each person he has his way of teaching, and it varies according to rules with which we are completely unfamiliar.
Those who wish to take God seriously better prepare themselves to stand there with devoted patience, knowing and accepting from the outset that He is that way: disconcerting and unpredictable because He is essentially gratuitousness.
Be patient! Patience is the art of knowing, of peacefully accepting that our efforts to seek Him do not necessarily correspond to the grace of finding Him; those results are not necessarily proportional to effort; that no psychological norms or laws of proportionality exist; that here everything is unpredictable and disconcerting because He is that way: pure gratuitousness.
People begin to lose faith amidst all of this, and say: “This seems unreasonable, we are wasting time, it’s not worth it…!”
And they end up abandoning everything.
Because they do not know that our efforts to find him do not necessarily correspond to the grace of encountering him. Because they do not know and do not peacefully accept that the results are not necessarily proportional to the efforts. Because they do not know and do not peacefully accept that He is like that; pure gratuitousness. In a word, because they are not patient.
Extracted from the book ´Journey towards God´ by Fr. Ignacio Larrañaga, OFM
