God is the Lord of History

God Is The Lord of History

“Why does God allow Turks and heretics to flourish?  They proclaim his infinite perfection.  That is the sole purpose of Pharaoh and all the impious men who have followed his example.   It is no use looking at these historical facts and figures in the ordinary way.  We must shut our eyes and cease to reason if we wish to see the divine mysteries in these affairs.

You speak Lord, to all men in general by the great events of history.  All revolutions are only the waves of your providence raising storms and tempests in the minds of those who question your mysterious actions.   You speak to every individual through what happens to them moment by moment.  Instead of hearing the voice of God in all these things and revering the mysterious obscurity of his word, however, men see in them only material happenings, the effect of a chance or purely human activities.  They find fault with everything, want to change this continual expression of God’s word and give themselves absolute freedom to commit every kind of excess, the very least of which they would consider a monstrous outrage if it involved a single comma in Holy Scripture.  “That is the word of God,” they say, “and all that is there is holy and true.”  The less they understand it, the more they venerate it and adore the depths of God’s wisdom.  Very right and proper, too.  But when God speaks to us at every moment, not with words of ink on paper, but by what we suffer and do from moment to moment, should we not give equal attention to him?  Why do we not venerate his truth and goodness in all this?  But we are pleased by nothing and critical of everything.  For we are judging by our senses and our reason that which can only be measured by faith.  We read, with the eyes of faith, the word of God in the Scriptures, and we are very wrong to read it with other eyes when it comes to us in his activities.”  (John-Pierre de Caussade, SJ in ABANDONMENT TO DIVINE PROVIDENCE)