Thy Will Be Done

Image Credit: Erin Jackson from 2023 Iona Pilgrimage

By Andrea Lingle

Thy Will be Done

After having, in our first petition, torn our desire away from time in order to fix it upon eternity, thereby transforming it, we return to this desire which has itself become in some measure eternal, in order to apply it once more to time. Whereupon our desire pierces through time to find eternity behind it. That is what comes about when we know how to make every accomplished face, whatever it may be, an object of desire. We have here quite a different thing from resignation. Even the word acceptance is too weak. We have to desire that everything that has happened should have happened, and nothing else. (Simone Weil, On the Our Father)

The certainty of God’s directing creativity is based on the certainty of God as the ground of being and meaning. The confidence of every creature, its courage to be, is rooted in faith in God as its creative ground.
(Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume 1)

God is good. Is this a reliable statement? Reality seems to make it a statement that requires a conjunction. God is good, and, but, so…

God is good, and life is hard.
God is good, but sin causes pain.
God is good, so your pain must be ultimately good. Somehow.

Thy will be done could be an indication of hope or resignation, trust or despair. As the hoped-for coin in the rattled cup clangs through our hymn of commitment, we struggle to reconcile a universe springing from a well-spring of love with lives running over with intractable pain. The immanence of God seems to be refuted by the immediacy of suffering. The doctrine of the loving parent feels irreconcilable with the reality of children whose lives are graven with famine and poverty. Finding a way through the undeniable suffering all around us to a loving center feels like a forced march, and attempts to reason away suffering feel like treading water mid-ocean and being told that there are rose-scented garden pathways scattered with shaded benches ahead. Somewhere. Nice, but not helpful.

One’s concept of God must grapple with suffering.

Evil and it’s effects are something else, and a conversation for a different moment, but if God is good and there is suffering, which there is, we must either admit that God is not able to stop suffering, suffering is punishment, or goodness does not preclude suffering.

The first reduces God to something which is less than ultimately compelling; the second is so harmful we would be better off without; which leaves the third: God is love, and love includes the fullness, the abundant experience—grim and grand—of all of life.

God, who is of ultimate relevance, creative source of love who is a relationship of love, includes suffering. This is the lesson of the crucifixion. Suffering is not extrinsic to love. A life with a well-worn track of “Thy Will be Done,” is not a life free from suffering. Thy Will be Done is a life lived, not despite suffering, but in open acceptance that to live in the footsteps of Christ is to walk with a limp.