In Amor Toles’s recent novel Lincoln Highway, two characters do bold things to take charge of their lives, but the courage to act comes only when they feel forsaken by God. One character, a black man named Ulysses, is running for his life on the Kansas prairie, seeking shelter from a tornado. He stumbles and falls in a churchyard (symbol alert!), the tornado overtakes him, and as the winds tear at his body he loses hope. Then, when he feels that God has abandoned him, he finds the courage to do a creative thing that saves his life. Ulysses comments:
The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from the cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.
Ulysses tells this story to kid named Billy, and, sure enough, Billy twice draws inspiration from it to find the courage to act boldly. Like Ulysses, Billy feels alone. “Once again, he was alone and forsaken. Forsaken by everyone, including his Maker. And whatever happened next rested only in his hands.”
My question is: Were these guys truly forsaken by God? Now let’s be careful. This is a novel. The inscrutable author might or might not be channeling Camus with a parable about people taking control of their lives once they shuck off religious superstition. These are characters in a story, but it’s a good story because Ulysses and Billy feel things we’ve all felt. Sometimes we feel alone, unsure about what comes next, bereft of divine comfort. Does this mean that we’ve been abandoned by God?
Maybe it’s the opposite. Perhaps “the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone,” as Ulysses puts it, is exactly right. Perhaps this is the spot God wants you to be in. Perhaps God is saying: you have some choices here. You could do this or this or that. You could choose to do nothing. Choose what seems best to you. I’ll be with you in whatever direction you take.
In the Ignatian scheme of things, the goal we seek—the pearl of great price—is freedom. Our freedom is constrained by “disordered attachments”—those things we’re in love with, the things we must have, desires and needs and cravings that obscure what we most deeply and authentically want. We free ourselves from these things by achieving what Ignatius called “indifference.” Here we’re free from our disordered desires, in touch with what we really want, which is what God wants.
Most of the time, though, we’re choosing among the good, the better, and the best—not right and wrong. The good is plural. God is abundant, not limiting. Christ is found in ten thousand places, wrote the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. God is found in all things, said Ignatius. If we’re truly free, and if we’re surveying a range of options which are admirable and sound, it wouldn’t be surprising if God says, “Go ahead. It’s up to you. Act. I’m with you.”
This doesn’t work if we think that there’s one right answer for every problem. Years ago I fell in with some evangelicals who adhered to Four Spiritual Laws, the first of which is “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The danger here is to think of God as a kind of celestial engineer who has devised an elaborate blueprint for your life. Your challenge then is to execute the plan. But Ignatius didn’t think about God this way. He saw God as deeply personal, present in all of creation, laboring to heal the world, showering us with gifts and graces. Ignatius’s God invites us to join him in this work. As David Lonsdale put it
God’s will for us is that we should learn to respond in freedom to God’s love for us, and to give shape to our individual and common lives in freedom by the choices that we make. There is a sense in which we create, in terms of concrete action in given circumstances, the will of God in this exercise of freedom. There is no blueprint in God’s mind with which we have to comply.
Some apprehension about making choices is entirely understandable. It’s OK to feel uneasy, even anxious. But forsaken by God? I don’t think so. Jesus said “I am with you always.” Freedom is his gift.