So you want all the answers

The following quote is from Brendan Manning’s book Ruthless Trust. The quote comes from another website where I read it and was struck by it:

When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at “the house of the dying” in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, “And what can I do for you?” Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

“What do you want me to pray for?” she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: “Pray that I have clarity.”

She said firmly, “No, I will not do that.” When he asked her why, she said, “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.” When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”

Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted love.”

I found myself thinking that the situation described above is one in which I often find myself. Sadly, I am not the Mother Teresa type, rather I am the type who wants clarity. To some extent, I could even go as far as to say that I want to sit in the seat of God and know everything that is going to happen to my life. You see, we do not realize that when we want full clarity, we are really asking to be like God without really desiring to be in the likeness of God. That was certainly one of Satan’s mistakes. It is certainly the one by which he caught Adam and Eve, was it not? Do you remember what the serpent said to Eve?

Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Can you see in there where Eve was tempted by knowing and knowing completely? The knowledge of good and evil implies the knowledge to so accurately know that there is no longer gray but rather an absolute knowledge of what is good and what is evil, in other words omniscience. But what God wanted from Adam and Eve was to be and to have life, to eat of the tree of immortality. Yet, I am not the omniscient one. I am simply finite me. Not only do I not know fully what is going on around me, I do not even know myself. And what little I know about myself is crowded with self-delusions and mistaken. There is an interesting set of verses in Isaiah that certainly help undergird what Mother Theresa said:

Who among you fears the LORD
and obeys the word of his servant?
Let the one who walks in the dark,
who has no light,
trust in the name of the LORD
and rely on their God.

But now, all you who light fires
and provide yourselves with flaming torches,
go, walk in the light of your fires
and of the torches you have set ablaze.
This is what you shall receive from my hand:
You will lie down in torment.

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness
and who seek the LORD:
Look to the rock from which you were cut
and to the quarry from which you were hewn;
look to Abraham, your father,
and to Sarah, who gave you birth.
When I called him he was only one man,
and I blessed him and made him many.

We are called to be a people who trust God rather than a people who try to have perfect clarity. Before someone raises a “but” let me comment further. There are verses in the Book of Proverbs that make it clear that we are to plan and to work hard. There are verses that say that we ought to “study to shew yourself approved.” Nor do I think that these verses speak against scientific inquiry anymore than the verses of Saint Paul’s writings that mention philosophy speak against either theology or philosophy. Rather this has to do more with the attitude of insisting that God owes it to you to explain why everything is happening, that is to have everything that happens or that you see happen be perfectly understandable to you. Both the Prophets, Saint Paul, and (of course) Our Lord insist that knowing God and trusting in him should be our attitude. For instance, contrasting “knowledge” and knowing God, Our Lord spoke these words:

Then He spoke a parable to them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’

“So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”

Then He said to His disciples, “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; nor about the body, what you will put on. Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing. Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds?