As I was navigating a tough decision that would impact my future, a priest-mentor of mine told me to chill out. Then he gave me a little lesson on God’s providence.
We’re prone to “make something happen.” It’s like a sickness. “Making” is an anxiety that replaces God’s providence with our own attempts to make a future for ourselves. It’s a self-made, bulletproof mentality. And, it’s everywhere.
There is a nugget of truth in maker-mentality, but it distorts it and collapses an understanding of God’s providence into the self. It fails to distinguish between Maker or Creator and craftsman, as John Paul II put it in his “Letter to Artists”:
The opening page of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image of God as Creator…What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing—ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it—and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God…God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman's task. Through his “artistic creativity” man appears more than ever “in the image of God”, and he accomplishes this task above all in shaping the wondrous “material” of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over the universe which surrounds him. With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. Obviously, this is a sharing which leaves intact the infinite distance between the Creator and the creature.
There is an element of shaping and crafting to our lives, but it’s always in response to a prior given, it’s always dealing with prime matter that has been given a human nature.
On the flip side of the maker-mentality, we can see God’s providence as a kind of cruel game. This is the devil’s depiction that has haunted humanity since his dialogue with Eve. Here, the sinister, cruel God opens a door when we aren’t looking and only for a moment. Then he shuts it, just as we’re noticing it in our periphery. Once we miss it, well, tough luck. Guess you’re stuck making a future for yourself — on your own. Or, we see God’s will as that which asks us do what we least want to do.
In the face of the decision I needed to make, the priest gave me a more peaceful, more relational way to think about God’s providence. He said, “God’s providence is the intersection of his desire and ours.”
Divine providence consists of the dispositions by which God guides all his creatures with wisdom and love to their ultimate end. (CCC 321)