Can I Say No to God?
The Monday Mystery Part 7: The Wedding Feast at Cana
And Jesus said to her, "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come." (John 2:4)
Welcome to the seventh entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will publish a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.
If you come across a young man discerning a call to the priesthood, give him a hug. Well, maybe not, but be nice to him. Don’t ask too many questions, and be sure to give him lots of encouragement. I’ve only recently realized how important this is. When I started openly looking into applying to seminary, I was taken aback by the number of people who went out of their way to try and reassure me that everything would be ok. Evidently, this decision terrified many others. I understood this abstractly, but I couldn’t relate to it.
I haven’t seen any survey data, but I’ve talked to many discerners since then. I saw first hand the heavy burden of dread some of them carried. Even among those who felt positive openness to a call, some were wracked with anxiety and uncertainty about whether or not they were called. In agonized frustration some wonder, “Why can’t God just tell me?” To those men, and to anyone who daydreams about the heavens opening up and God giving them ‘I know that I know that I know’ certainty about their path, I say this:
Be careful what you wish for.
My sense of a call wasn’t a heavens opening affair. But it was about as close as anyone could ask for. I felt God calling me when I was a student at Wayne State University. One evening, as I sat in front of the blessed sacrament in our small chapel, I felt an overwhelming sense of God’s presence. I know, I know, that’s vague. It’s hard to describe further, but let me give it a shot:
When I take time for personal prayer, I sit or kneel silently while trying to keep my attention on God, or the subject of my meditation. There’s a standard range of experiences I’d expect to have from this activity on a natural level. Sometimes these are pronounced, and not all are pleasant. From the kind of anxious, fidgety boredom I’d feel after a third flight delay at 2am, to the exhilarating creative rush I’d get when I’ve had a breakthrough, to a wholesome feeling of love when I’m bathing in gratitude for life and for other people. The range is wide. But the vast majority of the time my experience is fairly plain, and there’s usually a clear connection between how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, and what I’m experiencing.
But there in the chapel, my prayer left the range. What I experienced was totally disproportionate to how I was feeling and what I was doing. At the flip of a switch, and with no apparant cause, I snapped into an awareness that God was in the room with me. He felt immediately present in the same way that the people in the chapel were present.
He wasn’t just present, he had something to tell me. When I say things like “I received a word in prayer” or “God spoke to me,” I normally mean that my mind and heart settled on an idea or conviction in the context of prayer. Often it’s so subtle that I notice it after the fact. But here, the words were direct and unmistakable. They were not audible, but they might as well have been. They came to me so vividly that they carried a weight; they felt similarly to a helmet or protective vest which pushes down on you just enough to make you adjust the way you stand by a hair. They were:
“I don’t want you to be a faith study leader, I want you to be a faith study missionary”
and
“I want you to be a saint with the Companions of the Cross”
After frantically scribbling these down, I walked out of the chapel ready to drop out of school right then and there. Whether it was God who spoke to me, or I had experienced some sort of hallucination, I hadn’t caused this. I’d be lying to myself if I said it didn’t happen. As I reflected on that night, I could find nothing spiritually or psychologically amiss - no ‘tail of the serpent,’ as St. Ignatius of Loyola termed signs that a spiritual experience is dubious. I felt I couldn’t reasonably doubt that God had spoken to me, and that he wanted me to be a priest.
So with that incredibly important question settled, the rest of my discernment was all smooth sailing, right? Wrong! Having such a clear sense of a call led me to face a very different set of challenges. Since I ‘knew’ what God wanted me to do, I avoided the question ‘Do I really want this?’ I reflected on a time this came to a head in my essay, Shrek, Loneliness, and Celibacy. Since I wrote that, I’ve also realized that another major source of turmoil was feeling like I didn’t even have a choice. Time after time, when I’d be attracted to a girl, or when I wondered whether I’d be happier pursuing a career, I’d think to myself some version of: “What does it matter what I want? God wants me to be a priest. It’d be selfish if not disobedient for me to entertain this.”
As I discovered, it matters a great deal what I want. Practically speaking, it’s psychologically unsustainable for most people to do something they don’t want to do. Ever wonder why priests suddenly go crazy and run off with the parish secretary? Or why some seemingly happy marriages spectacularly collapse overnight? Or why some elderly people are constantly bitter and crabby? These and similar tragedies are ultimately mysterious, but I think a big reason is that humans have a finite capacity to ignore the sense that “I never wanted this.”
If I took a time machine to visit my past self and tell him this, he would probably say something like, “I see your point, but I don’t really have any choice, do I? God has called me. Can I say no to God?’ I would say something like this:
Not really, but you’re missing a big step in the process. If God wants you to do something, he also wants you to want it - that is, to fully embrace it. Paul teaches us that when we give, “Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). If you can’t fully embrace what God wants you to do - if you are giving under compulsion, or can’t give as a cheerful giver - then you need to hash things out with him before proceeding. Why didn’t Gabriel rebuke Mary for her lack of faith when she asked “how can this be?” And why didn’t God strike Gideon dead after he constructed (twice) a silly and completely arbitrary test to confirm a word spoken to him directly?
And remember Jonah, who said “forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” But the city was not overthrown. The king knew instinctively that not everything God says is irrevocable. He, and the city of Nineveh did not resign themselves to this unfavorable word, but pressed fully into prayer and repentance. And the city was spared. When Jesus rebuffed the woman with the hemoraghe who sought healing from him, she didn’t hang her head in resignation and self pity. She didn’t think to herself, ‘well, I guess Jesus doesn’t want to heal me. I’ll have to do my best to accept this.’ She held her ground and pressed Jesus. Not only was this not a sign that she lacked faith, this made her a supreme model of faith.
In today’s mystery, Mary contends with God in much the same way. She sees the wedding party run out of wine, and she knows her son can spare the wedding party what would be a humiliating failure of hospitality in that culture. To some, Jesus’s reply comes across as a curt rejection: "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come." But he ends up granting her request in a spectacular display of power and overflowing generosity. We can only speculate, but I think Mary knew full well that bailing a wedding party out of their poor planning probably wasn’t a part of Jesus’ game-plan. But she asked anyway. If you’re stuck in the way I was, ‘asking anyway’ might be the only way you’ll get unstuck. After months of praying at this new level of honesty with God, I arrived back where I started: God was calling me to be a priest. But with his help and Mary’s intercession, the knots in my heart were undone.
Do you feel stuck in your calling? Have you ever contended with God? The longer you wait to get to the bottom of your discontent, the more difficult it will be. As you do your test run today, place yourself in the shoes of Mary. Jesus appears to intend something, but you cannot reconcile this in your heart. No one had a closer relationship to Jesus than his mother. How did she approach him? What gave her the courage and confidence to press in, even when God’s answer seemed clear and final?