by Peter Kreeft –
In heaven (and in heaven on earth, the sanctified soul) our will conforms to God’s, not God’s to ours. The reason the saint’s desires are satisfied and he has joy is not that God is a divine dispensing machine and the saint has learned to press the right buttons but that he has learned to desire “the one thing necessary”, God’s will, and therefore always gets what he desires, for God’s will is always done.
“Thy will be done” is the infallible road to total joy.
It is testable and provable in daily and hourly experience. Time after time, active willing God’s will, “Yes” to God, leads out of meaninglessness, passivity, depression, or sorrow into joy. And time after time the pursuit of joy as if it were mine leads to disappointment, emptiness, and restless boredom. Life teaches us by millions of repetitions, yet we need millions more.
Every time we truly say, “Thy will be done”, we find joy and peace; every time we die, we rise. The saint finds heavenly ecstasy in picking up a pin for God. No lesson is more ubiquitously taught. Yet none is more doubted by unbelievers or disobeyed by believers. We are quite insane.
But God keeps kissing frogs, dispensing joy like rain, patiently teaching us to play His music, to learn the heavenly harmony of wills, training us for our perfect parts in the music of the spheres for which we were created. He is very single-minded. He preaches to us only what He practices himself: “There is only one thing necessary.” Yet there is no more complex lesson for us than this simplicity.
We desire many things, and He offers us only one thing. He can offer us only one thing—himself. He has nothing else to give. There is nothing else to give. “Why callest thou me good? None is good but one, that is God.”
God is the only game in town. If we won’t play, there’s no winning anywhere else. “That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way … God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from himself because it is not there. There is no such thing.… If we will not learn to eat the only fruit the universe grows—the only fruit any possible universe can grow—we must starve eternally,” [wrote C.S. Lewis].
MacDonald puts it even more succinctly: “All that is not God is death.”
… God’s single gift for all our desires is His Son. He is joy, joy alive and wearing a real human face, joy concretely real and not abstract, ephemeral, and uncertain.
And we are designed and destined to taste this concrete joy, to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord”, to drink eternal life like water, to eat God’s will like food, to “put on Christ”, not merely to imitate him. Becoming parts of Christ (“members of his body”, as Saint Paul says), we become parts of joy, in joy: “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
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Excerpts from the book “Heaven, the Heart’s Deepest Longing” by Peter Kreeft. (Emphasized words and phrases, and organizational edits — broke up larger paragraphs into smaller ones — to optimize readability made by Chris Banescu.
(Book available from Amazon – Heaven, the Heart’s Deepest Longing.)
Thank you for this.