No Generic God

From a new essay by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., posted on the Catholic World Report site:

Just before Christmas every year, the Holy Father has a meeting with local university students in Rome. This year's talk was centered about a passage in James (5:7) about patience. Essentially, patience is on the side of letting things happen in their own due time. We often wonder why God does not do things in a more tidy and speedy fashion. We set up our standard and wonder why God does not conform to it.

"There are many people in our time, especially among those you meet in university lecture halls, who voice the question of whether we should await something or someone, whether we should await another messiah, another god…" The implication is that the Messiah we have been given has not come through for us. We must look about, perhaps make our own redeemer. It is quite interesting to read that these impatient folks populate university lecture halls. We might speculate: why?

Everyone knows that university professors (and sometimes politicians) are constantly tempted to invent their own world in order to explain their private theory about how things should be. This Christian idea of receiving a revelation and waiting for the plan of God to unravel is much too inefficient. There has to be a speedier way. The trouble with such theories is that, once they are in effect, we end up gazing into the face of the professor and not into the Face of God.

We are created ultimately to behold God "face to face." But salvation comes to us in God's way and time, not ours. The meaning "in the depth of life and history" is that seeing the face of the Lord requires "patience, fidelity and constancy in seeking God and openness to him that he reveals his Face." It is a subtle temptation, to compare what God does to what we think, if we were He, He ought to do.

Read the entire essay.