The Center for contemplative practice
A Lay Cistercian Looks at Spiritual Reality
ARE YOU ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION?
I asked God last week if I win the Lottery, I would donate 10% to the Church. God answered me back and said, “How about 50%” As soon as I said that to myself, I knew it was misguided. I was asking the wrong question. Can God make is my winning the lottery so? Of course. Will he? No. God works through Nature and natural occurances. For Jesus, miracles were interruptions in those occurances, the natural order. The Resurrection is one such miracle. Yet, we continue to ask wrong questions, and so we get wrong answers. In the movie, Seventh Son of the Seventh Son, the Spook, played by Jeff Bridges. he says wrong questions get wrong answers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXiNkOjM7oM
In looking into my inner self during one of my Lectio Divina meditations (Phil 2:5), I thought of some other wrong questions I have asked in my question to have in me the mind of Christ Jesus and some I have heard others make. Here they are, as I remember them:
- God help me. Sounds innocuous enough but I run the risk of commanding God to do my will with this. Do I demand God answer me? Maybe yes and maybe no. With the Cistercian charisms of humility and obedience to God’s will, I can have less chance of making myself God and more of a chance to wait patiently while I call out to God, “O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.”
- If I request healing for myself and if others pray for my healing and nothing happens, then something must be wrong with my faith. Hope that comes from the Holy Spirit is not the same as hope that I have that I will win the lottery. Doesn’t the Scriptures say that, if I ask anything in Jesus name, I will give it to you? Depends on what you seek. If I seek God’s will in all things, and the ability to discern what that is, in terms of Cistercian charisms of humility and obedience to God’s will, I propose and God disposes. That in all things, may God be glorified, says St. Benedict.
- If I pray not to be like those other poor, tortured souls who do not have the truth, or have lost the way, that may be the wrong type of prayer. If I say, “I am a Lay Cistercian and I have the only truth and if others do not follow it, they are condemned to ignorance and the darkness of Hell,” then something is definitely wrong. I don’t have the truth, Christ is the truth and I with silence and solitude can seek to find Him if I have humility and meekness of heart.
- If I do contemplation as part of Lectio Divina and it is too easy, too routine, I may not be waiting for Christ to come by my park bench on a cold day and sit with me, I may be stroking my own ego that, like Adam and Eve, I want God to fit into what I do rather than making room for him in my heart and waiting for his mercy.
- If I think that I know all ttere is to know about God, that may bee a false premise. Seeking God is about going to place I am afraid to look, inside me. That place is limitless.
- If I think that, you don’t like the Church because it does not conform to what you think it should be (allowing women priests) and you reject all of it because they don’t agree with you, then you may be aking the wrong question. You may not be know you are asking the wrong question.
Can you think of other false questions you have about knowing, loveing and serving God with all your heart and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself?
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