"It's God's Will"

[sraf]

I've seen this answer given so many times to so many questions, most recently on the 'breaking and entering to stop abortion' thread: in short, compressing [b]carolou[/b]'s answer to my statement by saying that: 'to say that keeping the baby ruins a young girl's life is unfair. It's not like a complete waste of her life. Maybe it's God's will for her to have the baby. He doesn't just go up to her and ask her if it's OK. Aborting the baby is against God's will.'

All right. I see the reasoning. BUT -

I've heard this answer given [i]so many times[/i] to big questions - "Because God wills it to be so." She suffers? God wanted it that way. Why - God willed it so. But it doesn't explain anything! It explains everything, now take your catechism and go to bed like a good girl.

Could somebody please give me the actual word for this concept (I use to think that this sort of thing was called 'predestination,' but now I know that's something else) and what, exactly, it entails? Is this Grace, Providence, or some other complicated word? Does the Devil come into this anywhere? Are we pitiful humans supposed to bend under this and just accept?
And most of all, what are the alternatives to this worldview?
We've got right here, as I understand it, a world where we are what might be called puppets and God is the Master Puppeteer and where when we try to pull against His strings we break and fall with a clatter against a stage.
Is there another worldview where humans are in control of ourselves and our own lives, with God watching quietly and guiding from backstage?
Or one where everyone is just running around arbitrarily and God is collecting material for a stand-up script? (And if He is, I really want to hear that routine.)

I'm a good little Catholic... really I am. I'm just overly curious.

[cappie]

I'm not sure that this answers your question which seems to boil down to why does God allow suffering. Correct me if I'm wrong !

Christian Wisdom About Suffering

Let us attempt to summarize, in a few propositions, the surprising Christian wisdom about suffering that we find in divine revelation and will not find in self-help books, on Oprah, or in a consensus of "leading experts."

1. Suffering is not a biological necessity. We were not created in a state of suffering. We suffer because we sinned, and we die because we sinned. God did not design us for death but for life, and he did not design us for suffering but for joy: the joy of sanctity, the bliss of self-forgetful love.

2. God has intervened miraculously in our history and even in our very human nature, in our essence. In Christ God added human life to himself so that in Christ man might add divine life to himself. This transforms our sufferings, and especially our death, which is the consummation of all our sufferings and losses. It transforms them into a means of salvation and sanctification and glorification. We may now say of suffering what the old hymn "Open Our Eyes" says of death: "Thou hast made death glorious and triumphant, for through its portals we enter into the presence of the living God."

3. Because Christ entered into our sufferings, suffering is now a way of entering more deeply into Christ. We are never closer to Christ than when we share his cross.

4. This intimacy through suffering, when freely chosen, can bring about something exceedingly strange and wonderful: a deep, strong, and unmistakably authentic joy. To experience even little sprinkles of the joy of the saints is to praise the depth of the divine mercy in allowing us to share this unique and incomparable intimacy with Christ.

The difference between the Creator and the creature is incomparably greater than the difference between suffering and joy. That is why his sufferings are incomparably better than all the world's joys — not because they are sufferings but because they are his. It is an utterly profitable bargain to accept his cross, because he is on it.

5. Suffering has become redemptive not only for the one who suffers but also for the ones for whom he suffers. Vicarious atonement is a mystery but not an exception: We can share in it. If we are "in Christ" (that primary mystery of solidarity, of incorporation), we, like him, can offer up our sufferings to the Father-and he uses them. They become seeds or rainwater, and something beautiful springs up that we seldom see in this life.

If you offer up your sufferings today, in faith, to the Master of the universe, then someone else, perhaps a hundred years and a thousand miles away, will have the strength to live and love and hope — and if not, not. There is no power in the universe greater than suffering love. Love without suffering is like water; suffering without love is like potassium; put them together and you get an explosion. That explosion shattered the chains of hell and opened the gates of heaven two thousand years ago. And it continues.

How does it work? In his movie Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen plays an atheist son of a Jewish family who in an argument asks, "If there is a God, why are there Nazis?" His father replies, "How should I know? I don't even know how the can opener works." The wisdom of Job: we don't know. To quote C. S. Lewis again, "When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer' . . . Like 'Peace, child; you don't understand'" (A Grief Observed).

We don't have to understand; we have to trust and obey. To use Lewis again, "Now that I come to think of it, there's no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them . . . What's left is not a problem about anything I could do. It's all about weights of feelings and motives and that sort of thing. It's a problem I'm setting myself. I don't believe God set it to me at all" (ibid.).

God is less concerned with almost everything else than we are. Our feelings are our tyrants. All the saints tell us our feelings are less important than we think and warn us not to rest our faith, our hope, our love, or our deeds on them. Surely God is far more compassionate than we are; but he has compassion on us, not on our feelings; on our sufferings, not on our feelings about them.

Our sufferings are, or can be, holy. Our feelings are not. Our choices to love and our deeds of love are holy. Our feelings of love are not. Feelings are indifferent to holiness (which is our end, our destiny, our fulfillment). But suffering is not indifferent to holiness. Suffering is essential to holiness.
In the two thousand years since he entered "the wild weather of his outlying provinces" (as George Macdonald put it) to show us the meaning of suffering, to enact the meaning suffering and of love, nothing essential has changed. Nothing has been added or subtracted from our essential human condition: not the Fall of Rome, not technology, not anesthetics &$151; and not the fall of two tall buildings on 9-11-01.

But one essential change has happened. Christ's coming and dying and rising has changed everything — or rather the meaning of everything. Especially the meaning of suffering.