"Do whatever He tells you"

Almost two thousand years ago, in a small town in Galilee, a man and woman received each other in marriage. They were Jewish, worshipers of the One True God, and their wedding was typically Jewish. Thus, it was joyful. Worshiping the Creator of all good things, they knew how to celebrate the goodness of marriage, and they held a feast several days long to do so. Further, just as today brides and grooms find joy in inviting to their wedding the church ladies who knew them when they were little, this bride and groom invited a particularly devote woman whom they had known. This woman, a widow, had a son, so they invited him as well. Finally, this bride and groom, in their generosity, even went so far as to invite the son's friends.

They wanted to celebrate. They wanted to celebrate their love for one another, their love for God, and most of all, God's love for them. This is why they went so far to invite even the son's friends. Certainly they knew the mother, probably they knew the son, but the son's friends were fairly recent acquaintances. The son had only been with these men for a very short time, and indeed they were a rough and tumble sort of men. That didn't matter, though, to this bride and groom. Filled with joy and ecstasy, they wanted to share it with the ones they loved and more. So, they invited the son's friends.

However, it seems this young couple was rather poor. They made do with what was available and provided as much for the feast as they could, but it wasn't enough. Before the feast was over, they began to run out of wine. Now, as any lover of the Creator can tell you, it is a tragic occasion to run out of wine at a feast. In a purely material way, it can be like running out of the life of the party. Wine expresses the goodness and fruitfulness of creation. It fills man's heart with mirth, and when drunk appropriately, it leads him to celebrate the goodness of the material world. Running out of wine, then, would have been embarrassing because it would have been an indication that the poverty of this world, the suffering of this world, can overcome the goodness of this world.

Indeed, if this crisis of celebration had been left up to purely natural circumstances, the poverty of matter would have overcome the goodness of matter. But this wasn't the case. No, there were other forces at play at this feast, forces that would not let the play cease on account of poverty. These forces, the widow and her son, would not let the poverty of this world, born of sin, prevail. In their generosity, in their eagerness to affirm the goodness of all that they shared, the bride and groom had welcomed into their lives the very remedy for their suffering. In their love of Love, Love had come to them.

"When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, 'They have no wine.' And Jesus said to her, 'O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.' His mother said to the servants, 'Do whatever he tells you.' Now six stone jars were standing there, for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, 'Fill the jars with water.' And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, 'Now draw some out, and take it to the steward of the feast.' So they took it. When the steward of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew) the steward of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, 'Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now." John 2: 3-10

The servants knew where the wine had come from, though the steward did not. They had seen the "water recognize its creator and blush" as the poet has put it. And, we can imagine, the couple eventually knew as well. They may or may not have known then that Jesus had turned water into wine, but they certainly would have known that God had provided wine. Through servants doing whatever Jesus told them, the eagerness of the young poor couple to celebrate God's gift of marriage was rewarded with "good wine."

If, then, we are called to live in the world but not be of it, we too must emulate all the virtues of the wedding feast of Cana. We must live with an almost rash eagerness to celebrate all that is good. We must live with an overly generous heart even in poverty. We must give out of our love for Love, and in so doing Love will come to us and make up for our shortcomings. We must "do whatever He tells us", so that the normal water of everyday life might not be just for purification, but also for transformation in Joy. In short, we must become like those at the wedding feast of Cana so that the feast might go on - into all eternity.

When we put our hand to the plow, what will spring up?

"Pray as though everything depended on God, and act as if everything depended on you." - St. Augustine

Since writing on Wednesday about working hard and zealously for God, I have been thinking about quite the opposite. Well, what I've been thinking about is not exactly the opposite, but rather the compliment, the harmony to hard work. In particular, I have been thinking about how for every ounce of hard work we put into the Christian life, at the exact same time we should put in an ounce of trust and abandonment to the will of God.

I've noticed that so many things in being a disciple of Christ involve seemingly incompatible paradoxes like this. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." "The greatest among you shall be your servant." "Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it." Over and over again, we find that as Christians we must embrace two incredible extremes. We must have magnanimity and desire the glory of heaven, but we must also have humility and despise the glory of this earth. We are called to love our enemy, even though he may truly remain our enemy. We are asked to give up our very lives out of love for a greater life.

As Christians, then, we are called to be extreme in every way, and after writing on Wednesday about the need for hard work, I began to think about how there is also need for extreme abandonment. Like the other paradoxes, this seems impossible to us. It seems that either you work really hard, in which you take things into your own hands, or you don't do anything, and you wait for God to make up His mind about you. How can we apply ourselves and abandon ourselves at the same time?

And yet, there does seem to be a way to do exactly this, but it involves a personal poverty that many of us are simply not willing to embrace. The key to the problem, I believe, is the distinction between the work we do, and the results we see. So often, when we go to apply ourselves in the field of work we do so already attached to the results we will see. We think to ourselves "If I do this, then this WILL happen." It's natural for us to go to work with an end in mind, aiming towards a goal. If we didn't have this goal, we wouldn't work. The true poverty of abandonment, though, is that we recognize when we go to work, God will bring about the end that He desires. We are not the ultimate determining factor of the results of our work; God is.

Indeed, we find that often we put our hand to the plough and we reap exactly the fruits we were looking for. However, just as often, we put our hand to the plough and we find that the result is far from what we had expected or hoped for. We can put in great amounts of effort, pain, and sweat and in the end we are left with a result wholly unlooked for and wholly unwanted. What happens is not what we intended to happen, and we ask ourselves, "Why didn't this work? Why did I not get what I worked for, what I wanted?" We can become bitter, as if God did not answer our prayers. Indeed, from our own point of view it often seems that He has not answered our prayers.

And yet, if we had trust in God and truly united our wills to Him, the experience of disappointed work would be so different. We would find that during the work, we would focus more on the work and less on the end. We would find ourselves doing a better job without the pressure of having to bring everything about on our own. When disappointments came, we would have more peace and less turmoil in our souls because we would know that the true result of our work is not this or that earthly fruit, but rather it is closeness and union with God. We would find that, even if the fruit of our work ends up being disappointing and perhaps even painful for us, the work itself still has value in making us more in love with God.

The value of our work, of our hard effort, then, is not the results we see here on earth, but the results we will see in heaven. The true value of work is that it brings us closer to the greatest worker of all, the Creator and Redeemer. This aspect of work can only be seen, though, if we let go of the earthly fruit. We have to be poor; we cannot attach ourselves to our goals. We must be willing to work hard and allow God to bring us the fruit we need. To be a true Christian, then, a true follower of Christ, we must possess both extremes. We have to work as though everything depended on us, and pray as though everything depended on God.