Salesian Literature

Chapter 13  :  Dead to self, the will is alive only to God

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We have a neat way of referring to death as a passing, and to the dead as the departed.  It simply means that for men death is a passing from one life to another; to die is but to depart from the limitations of mortality and achieve immortality.

 

The will can never die, any more than the soul; that is certain.  Sometimes, however, it departs from the limits of its own natural life, to live entirely in the will of God.  then it neither knows nor cares what it wants; it surrenders itself utterly and unreservedly to the permissive will of providence, becoming so blended with this sweet will, so steeped in it, as to fade from view, hidden away now with Christ in God (Col. 3:3), where it is alive to itself no longer, but God’s will lives in it (cf. Gal. 2:20).

 

What becomes of starlight when the sun appears on the horizon?  It is not destroyed, to be sure; it is caught and absorbed into the sun’s greater light.  What becomes of the human will when it is completely surrendered to what God wants?  It is not entirely lost, but so swallowed up in God’s will, so blended with it, that there are no signs of it any longer, for it has no will other than God’s.

 

After all, if you ask a servant in the retinue of some important person, where he is going, he ought not to reply by mentioning such or such a place, he should simply say that he is following his master.  The servant, you see, does not go where he wants, but where his master wants to go.

 

In the same way a man who defers to God’s will should have no will of his own; he does only what God wants.  No longer does such a man say to God: Only as thy will is, not as mine is (Lk. 22:42) – he has no ambitions of his own to give up.  But he does say: “Lord, I commend my will into your hands” (cf. Ps. 30:6; Lk. 23:46) – as though indicating that his will is no longer at his own disposal, but at the command of providence.

 

If a man’s will is dead to self, to come alive to God’s will, it no longer chooses for itself, it not only complies with God’s will and submits to it, it is utterly self-obliterated, transformed into the divine.

 

Most assuredly, the human will has reached the peck of perfection when it is united to the will of our supreme good as the psalmists’ was, who said: Thine to guide me with thy counsel (Ps. 72:24).  All he meant was that he did not guide himself by his own counsel, by his own will, but left himself to be led and counselled by the will of God.

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