Seeing God in All Things

by Most Rev. Edward J. Slattery

"To see God in all things." In this short phrase the great spiritual writers have summarized the height and the depth and the longing of every authentic spirituality.

Whether separated by centuries of religious development, political turmoil, language, or culture, spiritual writers as different in their viewpoint and practice as St. Teresa of Avila and St. Ignatius Loyola, or St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Dominic, agree that seeing God in all things here on earth is at the heart of living religiously, so that when one practices this seeing of the Infinite in the tiny whirl of a salt-encrusted seashell, or this looking for Omnipotence everywhere, whether it be in the helpless aspen leaf that winds and twists in every puff of unseen wind, or in the full-sky flashing of an Oklahoma electric storm, then the believer begins to see how God is "all-in-all" until that double all is fully revealed in the "all" of heaven, when we stand before that eternal Mystery in endless, happy contemplation.

Light in the Darkness

But hardest of all this "seeing God in all things" is glimpsing the radiance of God's divine light in the darkness of human suffering. Suffering is neither holy nor desirable in itself. But suffering can open us up to God, and when we glimpse the presence of God-in-the-suffering as that which sustains us in the midst of our sorrow, then we begin to find consolation in our deprivation, peace in our heartache, solitude in our loneliness, and joy in our suffering, for we begin to identify ourselves with our Beloved, the suffering Christ.

Thus all the spiritual writers agree that suffering with faith is indispensable, since it alone allows us to come to terms with who we really are, with our real identity and our absolute dependence upon God. We recognize that we are nothing without Him; we recognize our "littleness" (as St. Thérèse of Lisieux delighted in recalling), and rejoice in the undeniable paradox of faith: When I am weak, it is that I might come to know God's strength. When I am grieved because of my foolish sinfulness, it is so that my contrition might be brought to fulfillment in the joy of forgiveness. When God allows me to suffer illness, it is so that I might discover that He alone can cure me. Like St. Paul boasting of his weakness, we can argue that the darkness is necessary or God's light will not be seen as illumination. For my weakness is the necessary arena in which God reveals His saving power. In short, suffering opens us up to God.

But one could easily—and profitably—reverse this statement. We can say suffering opens us up to seeing God in all things; but we could as easily say that without suffering, God stays essentially hidden. His love, His omnipotence, His omniscience, His will to save us from sin and death would remain hidden were they not revealed in the "all-things" of our painful lives. Truly in the darkness of our long-suffering we open wide our eyes and from ravaged hearts consider the essential question of faith: "Is it possible that God loves me—as I am?"

Does God Abandon Us?
This is the critical question. We must consider the possibility of a divine abandonment and then in faith choose to believe in its impossibility. And this is the gift which faith gives us. Faith is believing that nothing —"neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation" (Rom. 8:38)—can break the constancy of God's love for us, so that the very things which seem to prove that He cannot be trusted instead prove the opposite. Even the unmitigated horrors of the past century, rather than proving His non-existence ("If there were a God how could He allow an Auschwitz or a Dachau to happen?") proves instead the opposite ("In the midst of all this brutality, how is it that men were still capable of charity and love if not for the presence of God?").
Take for example here, the story of St. Ignatius and his conversion. A military man, a commander in the field, Ignatius had a leg shattered by a cannon ball. Forced to spend many months lying flat on his back while the pieces of bone knit themselves together, Ignatius looked to entertain himself by reading the heroic exploits of knights in shining armor. Stories of knights
and their romantic quests, plus the stories of the ancient heroes of Greece and Rome had always lifted Ignatius' spirit, and in his convalescence, Ignatius needed just such encouragement.
Unfortunately there were no such books available and so Ignatius was forced to read the Life of Christ and study the heroic exploits of His saints. Tame stuff, for a military man, as Ignatius himself must have mused, but what the Spaniard discovered was that he got the same encouragement or inspiration from reading the lives of the saints as he expected to receive from the exciting adventures of Hannibal and Cincinnatus. Only it lasted longer and proved truer.

Ignatius' Profound Realization

Ignatius had discovered something fundamental about himself. By reflecting on his reaction to the two types of literature, the worldly and the otherworldly—or the "real" and the religious—Ignatius discovered that while both types excited his imagination, only the spiritual reading brought a lasting joy. In sheer and inexplicable contrast to what Ignatius was expecting, it was the joy and excitement he felt in reading of Christ and His saints that left him feeling alive and strong while the pleasure he felt in reading about battles lost and campaigns won was quickly dissipated, leaving him bereft and depressed.

Thus in the midst of the suffering occasioned by the leg wound, Ignatius began to reflect in faith upon his own experiences, and in the darkness of that convalescence, he discovered the light of the Savior. Ignatius gave himself entirely to Christ from that point on, enlisting under Christ's banner and recognizing—as a military man might be expected to do—the demonstrable superiority of Christ who could reveal His power in the midst of Ignatius' suffering.

This example of a great saint, converted when he discovered that not even the darkest night could hide Christ's light, should resonate in the heart of everyone who is troubled by the recurrent scandals in the Church. So much of what we love has been tarnished and those whom we trusted have shown themselves compromised not once, but many times, by their willingness to overlook evil for the sake of some lesser good. We wait for someone to take charge and lead us forward, and instead we get committees, programs, and promises. Truly the darkness of these days seems to eclipse the light of Christ shining with splendid clarity in His Church.

Like Ignatius, you and I are searching for a joy that will last, a certainty that God has not abandoned His Church and that not even the sins of her priests or bishops can diminish the essential holiness of the Church, nor falsify her mission. Like Ignatius, we must come to recognize that our faith in Jesus, the suffering servant of God, gives us the ability to trust
God even when He seems most distant.

If God seems to have abandoned us to the folly of our own sins, then He allows us to be betrayed as Jesus was betrayed, mocked as Jesus was mocked, and falsely accused as Jesus was falsely accused. "He saved others," laughed the crowd at Calvary, "let Jesus save Himself if He is the Beloved of God." "Don't preach a moral life to us," they say, "when you have secret sins which shame you." Our accusers are correct—except that our secret sins are no longer secret—but shamed as we are, we still stand up and proclaim the Gospel, because proclaiming the truth about our sinfulness brings us pardon and humility, proclaiming the truth about our weakness gives us God's strength to repent, and proclaiming the truth about the necessity of returning Christ's love assures us that God loves us even as we are.

And if the Church seems to have abandoned God because we prefer the folly of our own sins, then God allows this scandal to happen because He can bring forth from this present pain a deeper humility on the part of prelates, a truer purity on the part of priests, a greater willingness to surrender to God on the part of parents, and from all of us, the serenity and peace that comes from knowing that "all things work for good for those who love God" (Rom. 8:28).

Most Rev. Edward J. Slattery is the Bishop of Tulsa and a member of CUF's episcopal advisory council. This article originally appeared in the September 2, 2001 edition of the Eastern Oklahoma Catholic and is reprinted in edited form with permission.

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