If this recent Christmas season has convinced me of anything, it is that it is possible to know too much all at once - or much too soon - for anyone's good, including our own. And especially in the matter of doing God's will. For instance, you or I might be a veritable Saul of Tarsus of holy-and-righteous determination. To say nothing of bloody-minded indignation. Yet even then, it sometimes behooves us to be at least as patient with God, and with His time and manner of unfolding, as He is with us, and ours. Even though that Divine patience might consist, at least initially, of knocking us off a high horse or two.
In contrast, I wonder if there are any limits to the ways in which our Maker can re-make and re-direct a soul properly teachable. As a case in point, consider the main characters of the Christmas story. Note how, unlike with our hero Saul, God never once uses a violent means to dissuade Joseph, on the return from exile in Egypt, from re-settling the Holy Family in Judaea instead of Galilee. Nor, for that matter, does He have to knock heads to discourage the Wise Men from returning to their home countries via Herod's all-welcoming Jersualem. In the same way, although Joseph was likely none too happy about the brute (and often ugly) fact of Roman occupation, he never once considered it his calling to execute judgment or revenge upon his country's occupiers - any more than the Magi regarded the assassination or other conspiratorial undermining of Herod as part of their mission. What each of them did, rather, was to understand just where his part in the execution of the Divine plan began, and where it ended. They were not out to save the world singlehanded, or even to speed up the pace and progress of the world's salvation, but merely to be its instruments.
Of course we can all be, and all have been, very different from Joseph, Mary and Jesus. We can have what we think is the completest blueprint, or game plan, or ultimate goal or end in view. So that all we have to do, having just been passed the ball, is to take and run with it. Yet notice how soon does our pending success become hostage to something we've got in our possession, yes - but that we dare not let go of. And how sometimes that Something - that all-consuming Action - in order to achieve its all-devouring object, has literally got to hack its way through thickets and jungles, not of foliage, but of human innocents of every age and description. And not just the occupier's innocents, but our own.
Again, this was not Jesus,' or Mary's, or Joseph's Way. But if you like, by way of direct contrast, picture if you can a very different Holy Family. One that was always confidently demanding to know everything up front. Imagine them being overbriefed on every minutest point and detail of an itinerary already bursting at the seams: a mission pregnant, not just with the future of Judaea or Rome or the whole world of antiquity, but with the fate of all mankind. Think of Joseph knowing all that in advance. And then wrestling with, or being tempted by, the knowledge that this mission, if done right, would in fullness of time result in the expulsion of the hated occupier (in this case not Jewish but Roman) from Palestine! Picture his anxiety, his fear of failure, the temptation to self-importance, the pressure of performance "required" to bring the Child safely back to Nazareth. The sense, in short, that pretty much everything depended on him. And then consider how that might have goaded him on towards, if not a violent, surely a more forceful acceleration and consummation of a goal known in its fullness only to his God and Father: and known by Him, not just from start to finish, but in every detail and segment and manner of unfolding. How else, indeed, except by leaning in as close as they could to Him, should the Holy Family have escaped a planned, orchestrated massacre of epic proportions - and that, again, of innocents?
The point here being, I believe, that sometimes it is enough to wait, and watch, and trust, and act trustfully and expectantly. As opposed to being sure of knowing everything right up to the end result, and then, why, simply following through. Except that, in the latter case, as you try to "rush project to completion," you very quickly find out that it's up to you to fill in the details, to try anything ("whatever works"), to probe every opening and opportunity, in the ever more frantic effort to bring your devoutly wished consummation to pass. And in the meantime, watch - as your "progress" becomes steadily more protracted, more grueling, and far more stress- than grace-filled - how the bodies and the blood keep piling up.
But if I may to return to the Holy Family, with its simple, stark, uncluttered faith. Ask yourself: Was there really anybody else, up to that point in time (or even up till now), who could have understood and entered into, not just the will or the command, but the very heart and longing, the inmost desire and good pleasure of the Father, and more fully - more closely and intimately - than this strange, humanly impossible human trinity? See again and again how they choose to trust in, and so experience the very presence of, the Father's unfolding heart. Rather than having to know every stage of it in advance, as if it were a mere project to be executed. God rarely speaks in blueprints. And even if He should come up with one for so wise an Age as ours, somehow I don't think even the most god-submitted Hamas, or our most globally-wise US security establishment, is likely to be stumbling on it anytime soon.
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