Nothing at all exists except by the positive creative act of God, and all created realities are created out of nothingness. Without God’s deliberate will, there is absolutely nothing real at all. And we ourselves, as St. Paul tells us explicitly, live and move and have our being in Him.
God loves us and created us out of love for each of us. He created us simply in order to be able to give us good things, and above all to give us Himself so that we should share in His glory and joy and splendor. . .
One way of describing the entirely good creative action of God is to call it His Providence. God provides everything. All is under His absolute control, and so one way of describing our cooperation with God’s goodness in all things is to say that we abandon ourselves to His divine Providence; we immerse ourselves in it; we agree with it; we want it. . .
Abandonment to God’s Providence, which is one way of describing the attitude of a person united with God, has a rather passive sound to it. . . [But] when we say “Thy will be done,” when we accept the will of God, when we welcome all that God causes or permits to happen to us at each moment, even when it is unpleasant or perplexing, we are not to do so in a negative or shoulder-shrugging way. . .
Although given the right understanding of the will of God, both in what He sends us to accept and what He sends us to do, it is not wrong to speak of passivity under the will of God . . . nor of some forms of mental prayer or contemplation as passive . . . I think that it is so easy for a passive attitude to be negative, a doing nothing, that a better term for our complete abandonment to the Providence of God is “receptivity.” Being receptive involves acceptance of a pure gift, but it implies one’s hand out for it. It implies wanting it. There is something positive about the attitude, although it implies receiving and not giving. . .
A happy medieval mystic used to preach on the subject of how God delights in all that He does, [and he said] that whenever God sees us doing anything good, however trifling it may be, He dances for joy. . .
Think of the joy you give to God when you really say “Thy will be done” and actually cooperate with that will by your own free decision and choice. You are living in Christ, hidden with Christ in God. This state is not a mystical out-of-this-world one. We are in it whenever we do good, however trifling the good, and God dances for joy. There are states of prayer that God gives some people in which for a time they are out of this world, joining in God’s joy, but for us, it is by faith that we believe these things, and by faith Jesus lives in us, and by faith we give our Father the profound joy He takes in His Son and in us in His Son.
We are meant to have the peace which passes all understanding, and we can have it if we accept all that God’s divine Providence sends us, saying “Yes” to God in all things. Jesus is our example in all this, of course. His life was one of extreme mental, physical, and spiritual suffering on earth, but His peace and joy through it all, including the Garden of Gethsemane, was maintained by the overwhelming desire He had to do His Father’s will. . .
I suppose that as He rose from the dead, Jesus joined in the dancing for joy of God the Father in a very wonderful way, rising and ascending into heaven as Man and sending the Holy Spirit to absorb us into the same path and that same joy forever.
