Releasing the Control I Want; Accepting the Humility I Need

“Worry about your grades and athletics and your friends will take care of themselves.”

This was sage advice. And my dad was the source. I was in seventh grade and my family had just moved to a new state and school district. And I was a little stressed. To begin with, seventh grade is not the easiest time to make friends. And let’s be honest… thirteen is an awkward, gangly, hormonally tumultuous age under the best of circumstances. But drop that thirteen year-old into a new school and compound his circumstance with the separation of his parents and you will find a thirteen year-old with a bit of anxiety about relationships.

“Worry about your grades and athletics and your friends will take care of themselves.”

This was the beginning of my love affair with control.

Now, I am not a control freak. (At least I don’t think I am.) But I learned something from my dad’s counsel. When there are factors in your life that you cannot control (and there are a lot of them), you should do your best to manage the factors you can control. And so in seventh grade, I found peace in having some degree of control. Study hard. Exercise. Play baseball. Prepare for football. Practice singing. Needing someplace to record my structured aspirations, a cheap bank calendar book and black ink pen were forever at the ready. There were goals to set, accomplishments to surpass, commitments to make and deadlines to keep. In this approach, I hoped, I would find peace.

And it worked.

Good grades and scholarships, athletic opportunities, musical ensembles and student council offices all came to me. And, yes, friendships took care of themselves.

It worked.

But there were still those variables I couldn’t control. The inexorable path to my parents’ divorce. Relationships with friends or girlfriends which proved to be unreliable. Aspirations I worked very hard for, but still seemed out of reach. I would pray for resolution of factors outside of my control, but when the expected resolution never came, I came to realize something I had apparently forgotten.

I can’t control God.

What does that mean? Let me explain. In the midst of deep uncertainty in my younger years, I found that managing myself and the direction I was going in provided me with some degree of security. Set a goal. Work at it. Achieve it. Feel good. Set another goal. And begin again. But relationships have always been different. Relationships are wild cards that require trust and freedom to grow. Relationships involve risk and uncertainty. And while guarantees of loyalty and commitment would be reassuring, any attempts to control friends, my spouse and children (beyond a healthy mutual respect and reasonable accountability) would only risk suffocating and destroying the spontaneous joy that emerges from relationships borne of honesty and freedom.

But somehow God has seemed different. Somehow I can slip into the notion that since God at times can seem elusive or uninterpretable, my relationship with him is more dependent on my efforts. Now don’t misunderstand, I believe that an ordered approach to prayer, Mass and the Sacraments is indispensable. But I seem to forget two very important truths about God: God is there and God is God.

God is there. When I ask, seek, and knock…God is there. When I ask for forgiveness, guidance and peace…God is there. When I feel alone…God is there. When I am overjoyed or exhausted, anxious or confident, contrite or proud…God is there. He is never absent. Ever.

God is God. God can do anything. But he may simply do it his way and not mine. He may do it on his schedule and not mine. And, if my antennae aren’t out and I am not paying attention, I may miss his loving action. Or he may hit me square in the forehead so that I cannot miss it. God is God. He is loving, kind and forgiving. But he is also demanding. He demands that we live up to our God-given dignity, that we love him above all and our neighbors as ourselves. God is God and will never be anything but indescribably, utterly beautiful Love Eternal.

When I forget that God is there and that God is God, I am discounting his part of our relationship. When I consider myself the primary actor in my relationship with God, I feel that when I act, I enhance our relationship and when I fail to act, our relationship topples. But our relationship is made of sterner stuff. And this simply fails to recognize and acknowledge that an ever-present, ever-loving God can’t help but reach out to me in incomprehensible and unsurpassable ways. In our relationship, God is always doing more than me. My pail full of ocean water is no match for the ocean of God. For this is the God of the Footprints poem who carries us when we feel we are most alone. This is the God of Job that says we must have faith that he knows what he is doing and the way he is doing it for his actions are rooted in inexpressible love. This is the God in the form of Christ who reminds us again and again and again, “Don’t worry.”

This is not a God that can be controlled. Nor, I have found, is this a God I want to control.

For what I need – what I must have – is a deep faith and an abiding humility to let God do what he is already doing: Loving me as the sweet child I will always be in his Father’s eyes.

And so I must learn from Fr. Jacques Philippe when he says,

“Interior prayer is not a question of technique. It is not a process that can be controlled because it is a meeting with God, who infinitely surpasses anything we can achieve through our own efforts. What must be essentially understood is that there is no method, but an interior attitude. For interior prayer, there are three principles: a true desire for God; the confidence that God will allow us to find that which we are looking for; and finally, humility: To accept our poverty and to wait for the goodness and love of God in all things.”

“The life of prayer is much deeper than the intelligence or the senses can perceive. Even when prayer is poor and distracted, provided that it is made with sincerity and faith, God can communicate secretly with the soul. He puts into it the treasures of light and the power of peace that is often made manifest at other times in life instead of just during prayer itself. And if one perseveres despite times of aridity, there will always be moments when God visits and makes his presence felt.”

And I must understand what St. Teresa of Avila means when she counsels,

“The important thing is not to think much, but to love much.”

And to do this, I appreciate the insight offered by Thomas Merton,

“Every minute life begins all over again.” 

Control has helped me a lot in life. But it has hurt me a little too. It is time for me to let go of the control I want and accept the humility I need.

Yes. Indeed.

It is time.