Illia Delio - Ten Evenings With God

Ten Evenings
With God

Ilia Delio, OSF

Imprimi Potest:
Thomas D. Picton, CSsR Provincial, Denver Province The Redemptorists

Published by Liguori Publications Liguori, Missouri www.liguori.org

Copyright 2008 by Ilia Delio, OSF

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Delio, Ilia.
Ten evenings with God / Ilia Delio.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7648-1742-7
1. Spirituality. 2. Spiritual lifeChristianity. I. Title. II.
Title: Ten evenings with God.
BV4501.3.D446 2008
269.6dc22 2008016448

Scripture citations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, copyright 1961 by The Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Excerpts from He Leadeth Me by Walter J. Ciszek with Daniel L. Flaherty, originally published by Doubleday, Image Books, 1973. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Excerpts from Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Translated from the Greele by P.A. Bien. English translation copyright 1965 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright renewed 1993 by Helen N. Kazantzakis.

Drenched With God by Thelma B. Steiger, HSF, used with permission of the author.

Excerpts from Weeds Among the Wheat by Thomas H. Green, copyright 1984, Ave Maria Press. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Liguori Publications, a nonprofit corporation, is an apostolate of the Redemptorists.

To learn more about the Redemptorists, visit Redemptorists.com.

Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 / 6 5 4 3 2
First edition

A book comes into being, that is, becomes a book, not simply with the ideas of an author but with the reading of the text. Every reading of the text helps create the book. This is true for all books both large and small, and it is particularly true for this one. I am grateful to the following people who read Ten Evenings With God and offered their comments: Stephen Kluge, O.F.M., Dr. Kenneth Harrington, and Dr. Thelma Steiger. I am particularly grateful to Sister Kate Murphy, O.S.F., who read the book, offered her comments, and challenged me on a few points. At the age of ninety-plus Kate continues to seek the will of God and still has a number of questions about God. I was thoroughly delighted to receive Kates comments and to know that even in the senior years of life, God always remains an incomprehensible mystery of love, luring us, desiring us, and embracing us, as we wonder our way into the glory of eternal life.

I LIA D ELIO , OSF

Happiness and freedom are the two main desires of the human heart. Every person desires to be happy, and by this I mean every person wants to be loved, to feel secure, to be at peace, and to experience goodness. But every person also desires freedom, to live without coercion or constraint, spontaneously alive in choice and action. This concept of freedom, however, is the secular view, the worldly idea of freedom as the ability to choose for oneself, as the idol of my parents generation, Frank Sinatra, once sang, I Did It My Way.

The worldly idea of freedom fits snugly into the consumer culture in which we are immersed with its proferred promises of enduring happiness, beauty, and longevity. Larger homes, bigger cars, luxury upon luxurywe are led to believe that happiness is having everything we want and freedom is the ability to attain our desires. This may work for some people who are skillful in accumulating wealth, but the truth is real happiness and freedom have little to do with material things or living without constraintand everything to do with God, who is the source of all that exists.

Some people come to realize the truth of happiness and freedom only when they can no longer depend on material things to fulfill their thirst for lifes deepest desires, such as when illness strikes or they lose a loved one or a natural disaster destroys all their possessions. Others never find happiness or freedom because they are too enmeshed in themselves and enslaved by their personal desires. But for those who are willing to walk by faith, happiness and freedom can be found by seeking the will of God.

Although many books (including many based on the insights of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the great teacher of spiritual discernment) address the subject of the will of God, I have chosen to explore the will of God not as end in itself but as the path to freedom, not the freedom of autonomy but the freedom to love. Too often these days, especially in the public political sector, we find will of God language used as a trump card for political agendas whether they entail stem-cell research, euthanasia, or the war in the Middle East. The politicizing of the will of God amid material wealth has created confusion and fragmentation in societyleading either to an abandonment of God or a shallow understanding of the will of God.

For some, the will of God is unimportant; for others, it is a fearful force that defines life. As a result, many young people have difficulty discerning their vocation in life. Amid lifes confusion they ask, What is Gods will for me? For some, the will of God seems too vague and obscure and so they exchange it for accumulated wealth (happiness is creating your own heaven on earth). For others, the will of God requires certainty and so they are drawn to institutions of rigid, hierarchical structure where the principal virtue is blind obedience. However, neither abandoning the will of God nor forming it into an ideology leads to freedom and happiness; rather, either extreme can easily throw one into despair and confusion.

The will of God will always elude us if we are looking for certainty. Because we live in a scientific age, we contemporary folk prefer immediate answers with a high degree of certitude. Just as science provides us with data, so too, we want God to be explicit about the divine plans for us. Perhaps this desire for certainty is not too different from the ancient Israelites who wandered in the desert and got lost. When Moses returned from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, he found the Israelites had begun worshipping an idola god they could see and control. Moses returned to the mountain to ask God for more explicit directions, more concrete revelation, and visible presence. But God said to him, [W]hile my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen (Exodus 33:2223). God revealed to Moses that Divine Presence is always hidden; one cannot see the face of God and live. That is because God is much more than we can imagine or conceive. We can never really know God or Gods ways because God is beyond all knowledge; God is incomprehensible love.

Yet, while the amazing mystery of God is beyond our human comprehension, it is not out of our spiritual reach. In his classic autobiography, Saint Augustine (of Hippo) tells us that he searched everywhere for God only to realize that you were more inward than my inmost self, and superior to my highest being. We are not only capable of knowing God within us (though we may not attain complete knowledge of God), but we are also capable of loving God (which is a higher form of knowledge) and thus we are created to live in the will of God.