July 2005 Print

Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.

"Every creature, even the tiniest, is in the hand of God as though it were His sole concern." So reads the caption beneath a charming photograph showing a man's hand, fingers unfolded, holding in his palm an adorable little downy chick.

"In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum."–Into Thy hands, Lord, I commend my poor soul, anxious for security, for the day begins with a need for security.

The need for security! Men throw all of their energy into the task of ensuring their security–personal safety, financial security, health security, work–union security, political security, etc. For all this, time still slips through their fingers like the pages of a book avidly devoured in hope of finding the security of an answer. Suddenly, one day, the page when they die is already between their fingers.

We secure our houses and our salaries but no one can ever secure the essentials: time escapes us, health escapes us, tomorrow escapes us. This accumulation of precautions does not take away man's feeling of insecurity because security is not in a particular organization of events but in our understanding of the meaning of events which, outside of God, no one can possess. We only ensure our security according to the degree of knowledge and love we share with Him who lives in the total security of His omnipotence–God.

Absolute security depends on the quality with which we live our time. Now, quality depends on the soul, and time depends on God. Security is hidden within the permission we grant to God to qualify the time of every one of our days, by our letting His grace take possession of all of the moments, one after the other, giving us the security of a soul established in the continuity of love.

Outside of this unshakable security, all of the other securities sought by men are the efforts of those who struggle to claim for themselves a sector of human life which remains at the mercy of the unforeseen, besieging them inside and out.

Time does not belong to us. We know very well that even the most human changes in our lives come from unforeseeable events, small or great, which settle into the day like the teacher who settles into his desk to draw the children's attention away from the pleasures of recess. He tells them, "The time for necessary learning has now come. Independently of your desire for recess, I give you my time and I use yours in order to save your future." Time is an educator that uses the present moment to explain to us how we should meet the future. It is a commentary on tomorrow in order that we might rectify, envision, and renew. It is the gaze of God keeping watch over our movements, sometimes impeding them to keep our pride from the pitfalls that it cannot see, sometimes pushing them along to take us even deeper than we realize toward our ultimate destiny. God never agrees with us: He knows too much, we know too little. God's good time is the eternal postman who is never on strike, who delivers to us the mail from on high with news about our absolute security, oftentimes at the expense of our homemade security. It carries with it a living, precise, and urgent understanding, challenging us to be good students and take in the teaching of the Master in order to be on the honor roll for existence-management. Nothing ever comes about the way we wanted, but everything comes about perfectly for the coming of His Kingdom in us.

If anyone is willing to look a little farther than appearances, we are enveloped in time like a little bird enveloped by the fingers of a hand. Like the bird, we are quivering with impatience to stretch our wings and fly away free in the fresh air, yet the fingers restrain us because they are of the hand of God who knows the storm is coming. Our wings would break in the tempest, so He squeezes His fingers around us a little tighter and we cry out, groan, protest, and disagree...."You will not lose a hair from your head without my permission. By My use of time, I think only of what goes beyond it and prepares it, that is, your existence with Me, Love Itself."

Security consists in learning the supernatural meaning of time.

Let us take an example: It's June. Since February I have been organizing my vacation plans so as best to please my family and myself. I have a good job, enough money, perfect health, relatives to visit, a pleasant beach, etc. I am master of my vacation, the reward of my honest toil and virtuously executed labors. I possess financial, physical, and family security.  Suddenly the phone rings and I am told that the New York Stock Exchange has crashed and my livelihood is in danger. It becomes impossible to take a vacation. The first impulse is to say, "What did I do to God to deserve this?"

I heard that same objection from a member of my family at the funeral of his wife whom he had loved ardently. The priest replied gently and admirably, "You did what was needed to go farther and higher."

Every day is watched over by Love to push us outside of time by means of time, farther and higher.

The gift of Understanding dwells in an appeal to knowledge held by Faith, tearing through the fog and provoking a ray of light to help us reason farther and higher and use our disappointments to know ourselves better, which would otherwise be too preoccupied with recess. For God, the time has come to teach us something new, something more necessary, something indispensable.

Our disagreements with Him are due to our differences of appreciation. He knows everything; we only know what is in front of us, and even this knowledge is superficial and insufficient. God knows that time is the currency of exchange between Him and us. He carefully prevents our wasting it on the world, on evil, on sin, and on the excesses hidden under the appearances of a good.

Our goal must be to acquire the security of having an understanding of time in harmony with the understanding God always has of it, that is, to introduce into our "fiat" a peaceful and strong agreement with the divine understanding as we let our selfish sense of tragedy melt away under the intelligent light of love and faith.

The first noble attitude we need to recover is to associate our day to the mystery of time which will unroll our day the way we might unroll a brand new tablecloth, revealing unknown and unexpected designs as it is slowly opened. Approving or disapproving these designs will not change the tablecloth: the only understanding we need of the tablecloth is where it should go in function of its designs-for the living room, the dining room, or maybe the kitchen. The design commands where the tablecloth should be put and the activity to exercise around it. Each of our days is a tablecloth embroidered with unforeseen designs of events-interior or exterior, social or intimate. Having a divine understanding of the designs means letting them decide the kind of use to which we put them as the events command. This is an illustration of how we use time, how we use the tablecloth woven by God, designed by God, who leaves to us freedom to understand it, love it, and live it, and preserve the intention of the Weaver who created it. We cannot do violence to time because it is made of a cloth which none can tear. But we can oblige it to produce that for which God offered it to us. At every instant, God calls upon our understanding to act. He waits for us to understand the details in the design and then, by reading there the meaning of events as written out by His Wisdom, to live them out-perhaps constructing, for instance, a stretch of wall in our interior city or cementing a fissure which threatened the strength of our fidelity. In bringing to time an understanding that the absolute Wisdom of God is its origin and cause, we eliminate the sourness of our anger and refusals which do not accept being deprived of control over the unforeseeable accents of time's eternal language.

In the name of a temporal security, we compromise our absolute security when we deny to time the right to tell us something essential about the limits of our social securities.

You might object, "But isn't this a mind-set reserved for hermits and Carthusians?!" Since when should we refuse to participate in the unshakable security of those whose schedule is constantly determined by the Master of time? Why should we deny ourselves that security full of a freedom which reads in detail the positive meaning of life's difficulties and raises up, with energy and patience, the weight and the burden of a schedule constantly animated, refreshed, and renewed by the Wisdom of Love traveling through the time of our day? The cool-headedness of the Faith is for all the baptized. The serenity of a schedule remains the peaceful privilege of all the sanctified. Loyalty of conscience, clinging to the unexpected events of time like the conscience of Jesus adhering to the wood of the Cross, is the victory of believers over the blackest hours and ensures the security of daily resurrections. After events have toppled everything for him, the baptized sees rising from the ruins outlines of a new map–that of the heavenly Jerusalem emerging from the secrets of His heart.

The charming legend of a little town covered over by the ocean echoes a troubling reality. To this day, its bells can be heard to ring loudly when storms move the surface of the waves. There are storms of unforeseen events, permitted by God in the time of our existence, whose violence penetrates to the very depths of our spiritual life to ring out the bells of long-forgotten fervors. Without the hour of God marked on the face of time to awaken our secrets, we would remain forever bogged down in the fastidious day-to-day of temporal materialism and never come to know the honor of the contradictions which accompany happiness.

"My God, I commend my day into Thy hands. Make this portion of time unfold with the application of heart that spells out each detail to tell Thee 'Thank You' if it is something pleasant, preserving it from ingratitude; to tell Thee 'Gladly!' if I must travel a short distance in the opposite direction from the plan set out yesterday; to tell Thee 'Why not?' if it means facing multiple temptations; to tell Thee, 'Please, take it,' if Thou wishest to strip something away; to tell Thee: 'Together,' if the cross is too heavy or there are too many tears. Establish my thoughts in a conscious faith, in a logical hope, in a love which does not choose but only offers–which is the only kind that truly chooses to conquer its time."

Let's get ourselves out of the habit of only temporal security, of only human foresight. This does not mean totally disdaining these securities, but I mean that we ought not forget that the mysteries of time reveal their ultimate fragility through helplessness, unforeseen events, accidents, and reversals of fortune which speak with authority the language of Someone who knows everything to the point of upsetting our time in order to call us affectionately back to Him (in spite of ourselves).

Our society of insatiable demands, of malcontents chained to their duty, of broken families, and of political violence, is a society at odds with the human nature which was created to be tied to the Master of time by, as all the saints could do, its reading what is worthy of adoration in time. The saints were so docile that they conquered the time of their earthly existence by establishing themselves until the end of the world in the admiration of men incapable of doing better than they. The days of our existences are a series of stair-steps rising up from the ground of time, each drawing us closer to Him who is outside of time. We are all living the dream of Jacob. With our head resting on the rock of time, our understanding sleeps as long as the mysterious ladder of our days does not appear to us glowing with the traces of those guardian angels concretized in earthly events. They descend the ladder of our days bearing messages from God, inviting us to meet Him by climbing up the ladder enveloped in the security of these messengers whom we fear so much and whose embrace always bestows the tranquility of God when we dare draw near them by our consent.

Translated exclusively into English for Angelus Press and published in this language for the first time. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray') was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.