Excerpts from The Mysterey of Work, Chapter III,
"Theology of Primary and Secondary Causes"
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“I ask you to give me only what I have given you”
THINK VERY MUCH OF THIS, that I ask you only to give Me what I have given you, to love Me with My love; and realize, therefore, that the reason and purpose of everything you do is to allow Me to act in you. And the more you try to do this, the more you will believe in My love for you––because you will have permitted Me to give it to you more. You must use your freedom for this alone, to allow Me to act in you, to live in you. And the more you permit Me to love you, the more I will show you what you are in yourself, your utter misery without Me––not to reject you, but to draw you more and more closely to My Heart. It is My delight to see you trust Me more and more as you see more and more your own misery. It is my joy to give you this precious grace of boundless trust in My Love for you. That is how I rectify you; that is how you become Me.
–A servant of God
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We are who we are by an act of God
WHATEVER BODILY OR SEMINAL CAUSES may play a part in reproduction, whether by the influence of angels or of men or other animals, or by the intermingling of the two sexes, and whatever longings or emotions of the mother may affect the features or the color while the fetus is still soft and pliable, nevertheless, every nature as such, however affected by circum¬stances, is created wholly by the Supreme God. It is the hidden and penetrating power of His irresistible presence which gives being to every creature that can be said to be, whatever its genus and species may be. For, without His creative act, a nature would not only not be in this or that genus; it simply could not have being at all.
–St. Augustine
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In Him we live and move and have our being
ST. PAUL WROTE that “In him we live and move and have our being,” and to this we must add, ''and accomplish all that we do” for, in the words of Our Lord (as we must ever remind ourselves), without him we can do nothing.
–diarist
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Always work together with Me––as if we were together
doing the same thing
MY DEAREST DAUGHTER, working for Christ makes the human work disappear, and Christ makes arise the divine work. For this reason, always work together with Me–as if we were together doing the same thing. If you suffer, do it as if you were suffering with Me; if you pray, if you work, make everything run in Me and together with Me. Thus you will lose the human works in everything, only to find them again as Divine. Oh, how immense is the wealth that creatures could acquire working this way, but it does not interest them!
–Luisa Piccarreta
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For God nothing is impossible
IN THE GOSPEL OF LUKE, the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Messiah, and when she asks “how shall this be done?” the angel answers that “with God nothing is impossible.”
We must always remember and believe that this is so in anything that God asks us to do, that his infallible Will will accomplish in us the work that he asks of us, be the work big or little, important, or seemingly very ordinary. Our God is the God of both extraordinary things and of very ordinary things. He numbers the very hairs on our head, so when we cut them, we can be sure that He knows and takes interest, hard as that is to believe. He has an interest in everything we do, that it be done well and for our benefit, just as would a loving parent whose son or daughter we are. When the entire world begins to live this way, taking the Lord's interests to heart, knowing He has our interests at heart, the world will be transformed. Meanwhile, will we not see our own lives transformed if we let God into even the smallest of our acts? How could it be otherwise?
–diarist
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Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain
Unless the Lord builds the house,those who build it labor in vain.Unless the Lord watches over the city,the watchman stays awake in vain.It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.–Psalm 127: 1-2 (RSV)v v v
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“I’ll do it my way”
REMEMBER THE POPULAR SONG that Frank Sinatra used to sing, “My Way,” with its line “I did it my way”? It’s the song of a soul seemingly separated in his heart from God, from his Will, from his Ways. At no point does a holy soul ever want to sing, “I'll do it my way.”
But does this mean that what is unique about a person, about what that person does––inimitably different from any other person––must somehow be effaced? It can hardly be so since our very uniqueness is from God; God has given each of us a unique part to play in his creation, one that belongs to no one else.
The difference between a holy soul and the Sinatra song is that the holy soul is doing all that it does, the unique things that it alone can do, in God's way for that soul, in the way that God ordained when He gave it unique life and a unique mission. There is no division between divine and human creativity here. When the creature acts in his or her unique, God-given way, God is present in this action as the silent, primary creative cause. And this is what constitutes the difference between acts that are merely original and acts that are authentic. A person’s acts are authentic in the measure they echo the Creator’s creative will for that soul.
–diarist
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“I feel that I am the object of His special action”
JESUS HIMSELF is my Master. He Himself educates and instructs me. I feel that I am the object of His special action. For His inscrutable purposes and unfathomable decrees, He unites me to Himself in a special way and allows me to penetrate His incomprehensible mysteries. There is one mystery which unites me with the Lord, of which no one––not even angels––may know. And even if I wanted to tell of it, I would not know how to express it. And yet, I live by it and will live by it forever. This mystery distinguishes me from every other soul here on earth or in eternity.
–St. Maria Faustina Kowalska
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(an extended excerpt from The Mystery of Work)
