Prayer about the Being and Will of God

Prayer about the Being and Will of God

This is a new version of the prayer on "The Will of God." To see the previous version of the prayer, click here.

Oh good God, I learned that you were a transcendent God who lives "there," far from us; that you were immutable and could not change; that you had predetermined everything in the universe from eternity, our own free actions included; all this must occur unfailingly. Theologians tried in vain to explain this contradiction. That was what we used to call "will of God."

Nevertheless it seems, Lord, that things are not that way. You are not the God who knows everything, nor the immutable and all-powerful God that we had thought; you have self-imposed limitations to your knowledge and to your power.

Your knowledge of the future is limited. You are not able to know in advance our free actions, nor the casual acts of nature; these acts are known only when they happen. This is the only way we, men and women, can be truly free and responsible.

Your power and control of creation is also limited because you gave autonomy and allow it to work independently. You usually do not want to change the laws of nature, which you established; that would be a miracle. In some way "you can not do" anything you want.

Neither are you responsible for the pain and evil present in humanity, because those facts depend on the free will of men and on the course of nature.

Nor are you an immutable God, but a God that changes according to what happens in creation, in particular our free actions. You are also a "temporal" God in the sense that you live with time and change with time.

And, although you can not be affected by anything created, you are, paradoxically, as a "sensible" and "compassionate" God, involved, with power, in our lives. You reign over all. In your hand is power and might. In your hand it is to make (anything) great. Through him (you) and to him are all things (1 Chronicles 29.12; Romans 11.36). Your presence and action in us is a mysterious one, but real.