Wanting What God Wants Is Our Greatest Happiness

The thesis unfolds in a short but rigorous reasoning, in three linked propositions.

Statement of the reasoning

Premise 1 — God's will is accomplished all the time.

Premise 2 — Now, the only and greatest happiness we can have is that our will be accomplished.

Conclusion — Therefore, if we want what God wants, our will is accomplished all the time, for our greatest happiness.

The reasoning is a spiritual modus barbara. If both premises hold, the conclusion follows necessarily. The whole point of this article is therefore to verify the solidity of the two premises, then to listen to those who lived the conclusion.

The first premise: God's will is always accomplished

This premise is treated for its own sake in a companion article — God's Will Is Always Accomplished: What Is the Meaning of Suffering?. We recall its conclusion here: the Catholic faith simultaneously holds three affirmations that many modern minds believe incompatible.

First, nothing happens without God willing or permitting it. Saint Paul formulates it as a challenge to any will claiming to resist Him: "Who can resist His will?"^[7]. Job, after losing everything, does not say "The Lord gave them to me and the Sabeans took them from me", but "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away"^[8], tracing the secondary event back to its first cause.

Next, God never wills moral evil (sin), but may permit it because He knows how to draw a greater good from it. "We know that in everything God works for good with those who love Him", says Saint Paul^[9], and the book of Judith specifies: "Let us believe that these scourges fall upon us for our amendment and not for our destruction"^[10].

Finally, God's will is ordered to our sanctification and our eternal beatitude. "For this is the will of God, your sanctification", Saint Paul writes to the Thessalonians^[11]. God wants us to be saints, because He wants us to be happy — first here below in interior peace, then for eternity in the beatific vision^[12].

The first premise once granted, everything turns on the second.

The second premise is more counter-intuitive. We spontaneously believe that happiness depends on external circumstances: if I have health, money, loved ones, success, I am happy; otherwise, I am unhappy. Catholic doctrine maintains on the contrary that happiness depends on the conformity between the will and reality, and therefore, when reality cannot be changed, on the adjustment of the will.

Three everyday examples suffice to make it obvious.

Three everyday examples: the pancake, the skiing trip, the job

Imagine three people facing three objectively neutral situations.

Person A sits down at a restaurant and wants a honey pancake. The waiter announces there are none left. She is disappointed. The cause of the disappointment? The fact that she wanted a honey pancake.

Person B goes to the mountains to ski. There is no snow. She is annoyed. The cause of the annoyance? The fact that she wanted to ski.

Person C loves her job to the point of devoting every day to it. A bicycle fall confines her to the house for six months. She is sad, even though social security steps in. The cause of the sadness? The fact that she wanted to work.

Three objective external elements — no more honey, no snow, a bicycle accident. Three sufferings. In all three cases, the cause of the suffering is not the event, but the thwarted will.

The same situations, a different will: the suffering disappears

The proof by variation is unanswerable. Imagine the same situations with a different will.

Person A bis did not want a honey pancake but a sugar pancake. The waiter tells her there is no more honey? It makes no difference to her.

Person B bis did not want to ski but to hike. No snow? So much the better for hiking.

Person C bis is an exhausted chocolatier who has dreamed for months of an extended leave. A broken leg and six months on benefits? She takes it as a windfall.

Three same external situations, three different wills, three absences of suffering. The conclusion is unavoidable: what makes us suffer is not the event, it is the non-conformity between my will and reality.

A wise man formulated the same intuition differently: "Happiness is not doing work you love, but loving your work." The principle can be extended endlessly — "Happiness is not living in the house you love, but loving the house you live in." The whole Catholic spiritual life draws a radical consequence from it: if I cannot always change reality, I can always adjust my will.

Self-will, the Catholic root of all suffering

Catholic theology has a name for the will that pulls in its own direction, independently of God: self-will^[13]. It is from self-will that all our sufferings come, because as soon as it is thwarted — and it is thwarted constantly, since reality does not obey it — it produces pain.

Saint Bernard, in the De praecepto et dispensatione (ch. 14), lays down the principle — God hates and punishes nothing but self-will — whence the formula that became classic: let self-will cease, and there will be no more hell. The Imitation of Christ takes up the same idea: "If you strip yourself of your self-will, you will easily find God and will always be at peace"^[14].

This analysis is not a call to abolish willing — a man without a will is no longer a man — but to change its object. As long as my will aims at an object other than God (honey, snow, work, success, even health as an ultimate good), it can be thwarted. As soon as it aims at God Himself and everything else in Him and according to Him, it can no longer be thwarted, since God's will, for its part, is always accomplished.

The language of Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta on self-will

The Italian mystic Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), at the beginning of the 20th century, received words about self-will of unusual severity. In her Book of Heaven — thirty-six volumes of writings dictated under obedience to her successive confessors — Jesus returns to this point constantly.

"My daughter, how many evils come to the soul — that lives in the shadow of its self-will!" — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 15, 21 June 1923^[15]

"All this is caused by self-will which, like deficient air, produces chaos, irregularity, weakness, in short the decline of all that is good in the soul." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 16, 20 November 1923^[16]

"And it is just the opposite for one who lives by his self-will — which is the key to hell, to miseries and to inconstancy." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 18, 11 February 1926^[17]

The diagnosis is radical: self-will is not only a cause of small daily annoyances; it is the key that opens hell, the ultimate root of "miseries" and "inconstancy" — that is, of the instability that moves the sinner from laughter to tears, as the moon moves from waxing to waning. Saint Alphonsus, more than a century earlier, made exactly the same comparison. These words aim at the first step — leaving self-will to conform oneself to God's will. The gift of living in the Divine Will, which is something else and infinitely more, is set out below (see Renouncing self-will, not the will).

The preceding analysis immediately provokes two strong objections. They deserve attention, because they are almost always raised by anyone hearing the thesis for the first time.

The objection of great sufferings

"All this works for everyday annoyances — a pancake, a day's skiing, a month off work. But there are 'great objective sufferings' before which this analysis seems obscene. If a person's wife or husband dies suddenly, that is suffering, full stop. The will changes nothing about it."

This objection must be treated with the greatest care, because no serious Catholic says we must hate our spouse or rejoice at a bereavement. The aim is not to minimize pain, but to uncover its structure.

Consider a limit case, for analysis only. Imagine a woman who truly hated her husband and wished to see him disappear, for instance because he is extremely violent and she cannot free herself from him otherwise. For her, losing her husband would not be a "great objective suffering" — on the contrary, she would experience the event as a relief, even as a joy. Yet the external event is identical to the one that would make another woman suffer. What changes is the will.

The experiment can be extended to every imaginable situation: if we keep the event constant and vary the will of the one who receives it, suffering follows the will, not the event. An event is never an objective suffering in itself; it becomes suffering according to conformity or non-conformity with the will of the person who receives it.

This analysis does not say: "we must want these great sufferings". It says: "even in great suffering, it is still the thwarted will that suffers — and grace can, without removing the pain, conform the will sufficiently for the peace of God, which surpasses all feeling, to remain at the bottom of the soul". That is exactly what Saint Alphonsus expresses when he says that, in trial, "the lower part of the soul feels the blows of adversity, but the higher part tastes an unalterable peace"^[18].

The objection of physical pain

"And physical pain? A migraine, a toothache, a fracture. The pain is there; the will does not remove it. How can we maintain that happiness depends on the will when the body suffers?"

The answer, here again, does not deny pain. It distinguishes pain from unhappiness.

Physical pain can be real, sharp, prolonged. But it is not synonymous with unhappiness as soon as the will accepts it in view of a greater good. A commonplace example: a person moving house may spend a day carrying furniture, end up with a sore back, arms and legs — and yet be profoundly happy, because the pain is accepted in view of a good she wants (the move). The same pain, inflicted against her will, would make for unhappiness; accepted within a willed project, it does not prevent happiness.

Saint Paul makes the same distinction when he speaks of the Apostles leaving the Sanhedrin "rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name of Jesus"^[19]. The pain of the blows is real; so is the joy, because the will wants what God wants for them. The martyr suffers no less physically; he suffers within a conformed will. Pain is not the same thing as unhappiness: the first is sensory, the second is voluntary.

The verdict on the three examples gathered

At the end of the examination of the two objections, the second premise holds. The only and greatest happiness we can have is that our will be accomplished. However hard this is to hear in a culture that measures happiness by external circumstances, all our happiness depends on whether or not our will is accomplished — and therefore, insofar as we can adjust the will more easily than reality, on the adjustment of that will.

Both premises granted, the conclusion follows: if we want what God wants, our will is accomplished all the time, for our greatest happiness. That is exactly why, throughout Catholic tradition, the saints were the happiest men and women, even though they sometimes went through the greatest trials.

Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), bishop, Doctor of the Church and founder of the Redemptorists, synthesized this doctrine in the 36th consideration of his Preparation for Death, entitled precisely Union of Our Will with the Will of God^[20]. This consideration is one of the major classics of Catholic spirituality on this theme; it gathers more than a dozen biblical quotations, several Fathers, several mystics. We follow its thread here.

The peace "which passes all understanding" according to Saint Alphonsus Liguori

Saint Alphonsus starts from the "No ill befalls the righteous, whatever happens" of Proverbs^[21] and draws a radical affirmation from it.

"He who stands united to the will of God enjoys, even here below, a continual peace. […] Our soul cannot taste a sweeter satisfaction than to see its desires fulfilled. Now, if it wants only what God wants, it has all it desires, since nothing happens except by the will of God." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration, third point^[22]

The happiness of the just is not the removal of trials, but the union of the will with the first cause that permits them. Saint Alphonsus gives the most radical formulation of it in the same consideration:

"Come cold, heat, rain, wind, he who stands united to the will of God says: I want all this, because God so wills it. Come a reversal of fortune, persecution, sickness, even death: I want, he says, this misfortune, this disgrace, I want to be sick and even to die, because God so wills it." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration, third point^[23]

The image that follows, in the 36th consideration, is one of the most striking in the book:

"He who abandons himself to the divine will and finds good all that the Lord does, is like a man raised above the clouds who sees the storms raging at his feet, without being touched or troubled. There is that peace of which the Apostle speaks, 'which passes all understanding and all the delights of the world' (Philippians 4:7)." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration, third point^[24]

The peace which passes all understanding is exactly the promise Saint Paul makes to the Philippians ("and the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus"^[25]). Saint Alphonsus sees in it the practical consequence of the union of the two wills.

The just man like the sun, the sinner like the moon

The analysis continues with a comparison borrowed from Ecclesiasticus^[26].

"'The holy man continueth in wisdom as the sun,' says Ecclesiasticus; 'the fool is changed as the moon.' This fool is the sinner; he changes like the moon; and just as the moon waxes today and wanes tomorrow, so we see the sinner pass from day to day from laughter to tears; today amiable and obliging in temper, tomorrow he will be sad and furious. […] By contrast, the just man is like the sun: whatever happens to him, he is always found equal to himself, always calm and tranquil, because the peace he enjoys consists in his conformity to the will of God." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration, third point^[27]

It is the inconstancy of the sinner that Jesus already reproached in Luisa Piccarreta in the 1926 passage quoted above. Saint Alphonsus gives its precise psychological cause: the sinner changes because he depends on events, whose mood follows conformity with his self-will; the just man abides because he depends only on God, whose will abides.

The natural objection — "but does not God Himself say that one who wants a good cannot be thus indifferent to trial?" — is dealt with by Saint Alphonsus. No doubt, he writes, we still feel the blows of adversity in the lower part of the soul; but at the same time, we taste an unalterable peace in the higher part^[28]. Christ Himself sweated blood in Gethsemane, and yet His "not my will, but thine"^[29] is the perfect model of union.

Salvian and the happy life of resigned souls

Saint Alphonsus supports his argument with Salvian of Marseilles, a 5th-century priest whose De gubernatione Dei (book I) deals precisely with God's government of the world and the condition of the just in trial. The quotation has become classic:

"Souls resigned to the will of God receive, it is true, humiliations, but they want to be humiliated; they fall into poverty, but poverty pleases them; in short, whatever happens to them, they want it; thus they lead a happy life." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration, quoting and adapting into French Salvian of Marseilles, De gubernatione Dei, book I, n. 2^[30]

The spiritual mechanism is exactly that of the chocolatier at the beginning: the will, stripped of what it would demand in the carnal order, now wants what happens — not because suffering would be delicious in itself, but because the higher will embraces the good God draws from it. Salvian saw in this unity of the will the secret of the happiness of the just already in this world — "there are none happier" ("Nulli beatiores...").

Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi: ecstasy at the words "will of God"

The same 36th consideration reports a striking trait of Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi (1566-1607), a Florentine Carmelite canonized in 1669. According to the account of her biographer Vincenzo Puccini, reported by Saint Alphonsus^[31], she could not hear the words will of God without falling into an ecstasy of love.

"Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi could not hear these words — 'will of God' — without feeling a consolation that put her beside herself and cast her into an ecstasy of love." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration, third point^[32]

This biographical detail will seem excessive to the modern reader. Yet it says exactly what the preceding analysis demonstrates rationally: for someone who has understood that God's will is both what is always accomplished and what wills his good, the mere utterance of that will is already a joy. The saint lives what the syllogism concludes.

Catholic tradition has fixed this doctrine in several emblematic narratives, from the 5th century of Salvian down to Luisa Piccarreta in the 20th. Three of them have become lasting references: the beggar of the Divine Institutions attributed to John Tauler, the miracle-working monk reported by Caesarius of Heisterbach, and the great dialogue between the Eternal Father and Saint Catherine of Siena. All three say the same thing in three different registers: conformity of the will to God is the practical secret of happiness already on this earth, accessible as much to an illiterate beggar as to a Doctor of the Church.

The beggar who never had a bad day (Tauler)

The first is a traditional dialogue, reported in the Divine Institutions attributed to John Tauler (c. 1300-1361)^[33]. A theologian, after eight years of prayer to be shown the way of truth, is sent by a heavenly voice to the church steps, where he finds a wounded beggar, naked, muddy, whose clothes are not worth three farthings. The dialogue that follows is one of the finest brief texts of Rhineland mysticism.

"— May God grant you a good day. — I do not remember ever having had a bad day. — May God make you happy. — But I have never been unhappy. — Speak more plainly, I do not understand. — Gladly. You wished me a good day: I answered that I do not remember ever having had a bad one; indeed, when hunger presses me, I praise God; if I suffer from cold, if hail, snow or rain fall, if the weather is calm or stormy, I praise God; when I am in need, in rejection and contempt, I praise God still; and, consequently, a bad day never befalls me. […] I know how to live with God, and I am certain that all He does can only be very good. That is why, whatever I receive from God, or He permits me to receive from elsewhere, prosperity or adversity, sweetness or bitterness, I regard it as good fortune, and accept it with joy from His hand. […] I am firmly resolved to attach myself to the will of God alone, and I have so melted my will into His, that whatever He wills, I will too. Consequently, I have never been unhappy." — Dialogue of the theologian and the beggar, Divine Institutions attributed to Tauler, 14th century^[34]

The theologian, struck, asks the beggar who he is. "I am a king", answers the poor man. "Where is your kingdom? — It is in my soul, because I have learned to govern my outward and inward senses; this kingship is worth more than all those of the earth." The theologian then understands "that true resignation joined to profound humility is the shortest way to go to God".

This narrative marked all of late-medieval and modern spirituality. It says in one scene what the whole article demonstrates: radical poverty does not prevent happiness if the will is united to God, and worldly wealth does not give it if self-will remains intact.

The miracle-working monk of the Dialogus miraculorum (Caesarius of Heisterbach)

The second narrative comes from Caesarius of Heisterbach (c. 1180 – c. 1240), novice master at the Cistercian monastery of Heisterbach (Rhineland Germany), author of the Dialogus miraculorum compiled between 1219 and 1223^[35]. Note: the Vivès edition of Saint Alphonsus's works mistakenly attributes this passage to "Caesarius of Arles" — that is, to the bishop of Arles († 542); it is in reality Caesarius of Heisterbach, and the error is purely typographical (confusion between the two Latin Caesarius figures)^[36].

The exemplum stages an ordinary monk — a tale with edifying value, not a historical chronicle:

"There was in a monastery a monk whose life was no more austere than that of the other religious and who nevertheless worked many miracles. His abbot, quite astonished, asked him his secret. He answered that he was the most imperfect of all the religious, but that he applied himself only to wanting in all things what God wanted. 'But,' the superior went on, 'those ravages our enemy caused the other day on our lands, did you feel no pain at them? — None, Father, he answered, and I even thanked the Lord for them; for it is He who does or permits all for our good.' At these words, the abbot recognized the holiness of the good religious." — Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, dist. 10, ch. 6 (Antwerp, 1604, p. 603) — quoted by Saint Alphonsus Liguori^[37]

The lesson of this exemplum is clear: this monk is no extraordinary ascetic. He has no more fasts nor more mortifications than his brethren. His holiness lies in a single adjustment — wanting, in everything, only what God wants. It is to this conformity that the tale attributes his miracles, because it reproduces in the creature what is proper to the Trinity: a will perfectly attuned to the good pleasure of the Father.

Catherine of Siena: "My servants feel no affliction"

The third narrative carries an authority superior to the first two: it comes directly from the Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Doctor of the Church, a Dominican mystic received by Jesus and the Eternal Father in a long colloquy whose transcription she dictated. In chapter XLVIII (48) — "The servants of the world are not satisfied with their goods. Of the torment caused them by their perverse will" — the Eternal Father says to her:

"I told you that from the will come the pains of man. Since My servants have stripped themselves of their will and clothed themselves with Mine, they feel no affliction; they are always satisfied, because they feel that I am in their soul by grace. Those who have Me not cannot be satisfied, even if they possessed the whole world, for created things are less than man, since they are made for man, and not man for them." — The Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ch. XLVIII (48), trans. E. Cartier^[38]

The rest of the chapter is just as remarkable. In it the Eternal Father shows that the servants of the world are tortured by two principal pains: "the fear of losing what they possess, and the love of what they cannot have"^[39]. His servants, conversely, "are persecuted, but their soul is tranquil because they are united to My will and are content to suffer for Me"^[40].

The central sentence — "Since My servants have stripped themselves of their will and clothed themselves with Mine, they feel no affliction" — has become one of the finest statements of Catholic spirituality on conformity to God's will. Saint Augustine had already prepared it in his Confessions ("our heart is restless until it rests in thee"^[41]); Saint Catherine gives its positive and concrete formulation: stripping off of self-will, clothing with the divine will, end of affliction.

This doctrine is not a medieval spiritual invention. It is solidly rooted in Sacred Scripture and in the Magisterium. We note here its essential landmarks.

Sanctification and the greatest good: Saint Paul's "your sanctification"

The apostle Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, leaves no ambiguity about what God wants for us:

"For this is the will of God, your sanctification." — 1 Thessalonians 4:3^[42]

That God wills our sanctification means He wills our beatitude — first here below in the interior peace of the just, then for eternity in the beatific vision. All that He permits or wills in our life is ordered to this end. "He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, will He not also give us all things with Him?"^[43] — Saint Paul's a fortiori argument, taken up by Saint Alphonsus: if God delivered up His Son, He can refuse us nothing that truly serves our good.

That is the meaning of Peter's formula, become a maxim of Catholic abandonment: "Cast all your anxieties on Him, for He cares about you"^[44].

The third petition of the Our Father: "Thy will be done"

The deepest rooting of this doctrine is in the very prayer Jesus taught His disciples. The third petition of the Our Father bears explicitly on the conformity of all wills to the Father's:

"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." — Matthew 6:10^[45]

This petition is doubly important. On the one hand, it recognizes that the Father's will is already perfectly accomplished in heaven — among the angels and saints, who want in all things what God wants, and who are, for that reason, perfectly happy. On the other hand, it asks that this same will be accomplished on earth — that is, in our pilgrim lives, despite the resistance of sin and self-will.

Jesus Himself, in the agony of Gethsemane, gave the perfect model of prayer:

"Father, if Thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but Thine, be done." — Luke 22:42^[46]

These words do not deny Christ's natural desire — Christ's humanity wanted to avoid the Passion; that is the object of the first half of the sentence. But they subordinate that desire to the Father's will, which ordered the Passion to the redemption of the world. "For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me"^[47] — that is the permanent attitude of the incarnate Word, the model of every Christian will.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church on the third petition

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) devotes six articles (§§ 2822-2827) to the third petition of the Our Father. Four passages deserve to be retained.

On the Father's will as the universal salvific will:

"It is the will of our Father 'that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth' (1 Tim 2:3-4). He 'is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish' (2 Pet 3:9). His commandment which sums up all the others and which tells us His whole will, is that 'we love one another even as He has loved us' (Jn 13:34)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2822^[48]

On the perfect fulfillment of this will in Christ:

"It is in Christ, and through His human will, that the will of the Father has been perfectly fulfilled once and for all. Jesus said on entering into this world: 'Lo, I have come to do Thy will, O God' (Heb 10:7). Jesus alone can say: 'I always do what is pleasing to Him' (Jn 8:29). In the prayer of His agony, He consents totally to this will: 'Let it be not my will that is done, but Thine!' (Lk 22:42)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2824^[49]

On our union with Christ's will:

"How much more should we, creatures and sinners who have become in Him children of adoption, ask our Father to unite our will to His Son's, to fulfill His will, His plan of salvation for the life of the world. We are radically incapable of this, but united with Jesus and with the power of His Holy Spirit, we can surrender our will to Him and decide to choose what His Son has always chosen: to do what is pleasing to the Father." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2825^[50]

On discernment and perseverance:

"It is through prayer that we can 'discern what is the will of God' (Rom 12:2) and obtain 'endurance to do it' (Heb 10:36). Jesus teaches us that one enters the Kingdom of heaven, not by words, but 'by doing the will of my Father in heaven' (Mt 7:21)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2826^[51]

The Catechism quotes Saint Augustine here to conclude: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven — in the Church as in our Lord Jesus Christ; in the Bride to whom He is espoused, as in the Bridegroom who has accomplished the will of the Father"^[52]. Conformity of the will is therefore not an individual ascetic exercise; it is the common work of Christ and His Church, into which every baptized person is called to enter.

The syllogism once granted, one question remains — the most important: how does one want, concretely, what God wants? It is not a brute effort of the will. It is not fatalism. It is not disguised Stoicism. It is a spiritual apprenticeship that presupposes grace and unfolds over a lifetime.

Catholic tradition has marked out this path in several stages; here are the main ones, with no claim to exhaustiveness.

First believe that God is good

The first condition of conformity is faith that God's will is good. If I doubt that God loves me, I will not be able to want what He wants. That is why Saint Alphonsus insisted that we constantly repeat to ourselves: "And what does God want, but our good?"^[53]. The Catechism comments, quoting Jesus Himself in the Sermon on the Mount: "For He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust"^[54]. Divine fatherhood is not a vague feeling: it is a dogmatic fact, founded on Christ's revelation, and the condition of possibility of the whole spirituality of abandonment.

Distinguish the will of sign and the will of good pleasure

Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622), in the Treatise on the Love of God (books VIII and IX, 1616), distinguishes the will of sign — what God clearly indicates to us through His commandments, His counsels, His inspirations — and the will of good pleasure — what God permits or wills in the events He disposes for us^[55]. Wanting what God wants presupposes actively fulfilling the first (obeying the commandments, following the counsels, listening to inspirations) and peacefully receiving the second (receiving with faith the events of providence).

This distinction protects the doctrine from two opposite misunderstandings. Without the will of sign, abandonment becomes resigned passivity: we would no longer act, we would endure. Without the will of good pleasure, moral effort becomes cramped voluntarism: we would claim to regulate reality alone according to our plans. The Salesian synthesis holds together active obedience and passive trust — it is the heart of what Jean-Pierre de Caussade would later call abandonment to divine providence.

Ask for grace, because it surpasses us

This twofold conformity surpasses our strength. The Catechism says so explicitly: "we are radically incapable of this"^[56]. We must therefore ask for it — that is precisely the object of the third petition of the Our Father, to be repeated all the more as the trial is harsh. Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Alphonsus reports, "offered herself to God at least fifty times a day, that He might dispose of her according to His good pleasure"^[57]. This daily repetition is not a magic formula but the slow disposition of the will to let itself be conformed by grace. That is the technical meaning of the word mental prayer in the Carmelite tradition.

Renounce self-will, not the will

The classic mistake is to believe we must abolish all will. No: we must change its object. The will remains alive, ardent, but it now wants what God wants, above all else. Saint Thomas Aquinas already distinguished voluntas propria (the will seeking itself) from voluntas conformata (the will adjusted to the good)^[58]: the first renunciation does not abolish the second, it frees it.

But two things must be distinguished here. Conforming oneself to God's will is what a good servant does: there are two wills — mine, which I submit, and God's, which I follow. Living in the Divine Will is something else, and infinitely more: there is but one will, because it is God Himself who acts in me — like a father taking his small child's hand to write with him. The acts of each day, even the smallest, then take on a divine, infinite value, which is no longer mine. Conformity is the first, necessary step through which we must pass; life in the Divine Will is its crowning, received as a gift. That is what Jesus explains to Luisa Piccarreta in the Book of Heaven: not the extinction of the will, but its effacement to leave all room for God acting in it^[59]. See The Divine Will.

Live the third petition as the soul's breathing

Saint Alphonsus ends his 36th consideration on a practical note:

"What happiness to live and die crying out: Thy will be done, yes, may it be done forever!" — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration, third point^[60]

Repetition is not routine. It is a breathing of the soul which, at each contrary event, refocuses self-will upon the Father's will. What Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi lived in ecstasy, the ordinary Christian lives in daily prayer, and notably in the Our Father recited with attention. The same prayer, already perfectly lived by the angels and saints of Heaven, thus becomes the instrument by which earth gradually adjusts itself to Heaven — "on earth as it is in heaven".

Go Deeper with Via Divina — This article presents in encyclopedia form a lesson from the free basic Via Divina formation on conforming the human will to the divine will. To follow the complete teaching as part of a structured spiritual journey: open the Via Divina formation.

The monk of Caesarius of Heisterbach's exemplum says it in his own way: the highest possible holiness does not lie in extraordinary austerities, but in the simple decision to want, in everything, only what God wants. It is within reach of the chocolatier as of the contemplative, of the peasant as of the theologian. It is the full accomplishment of the third petition of the Our Father: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" — that is, in me as among the angels and saints, at every instant, in the greatest as in the smallest circumstance.

Conversely, not wanting what God wants is not only the path to unhappiness on this earth, but — in Jesus's severe words to Luisa — "one who lives by his self-will — which is the key to hell, to miseries and to inconstancy"^[61]. All our happiness, like all our unhappiness, depends in the last analysis on this interior adjustment.

How to succeed in this adjustment, concretely, in prayer, in trials, in each day's choices? That is the object of the whole Catholic spiritual life — and it is precisely what the neighboring articles of this encyclopedia develop, on prayer, abandonment, trust and sanctification.

• God's Will Is Always Accomplished: What Is the Meaning of Suffering? — the first premise of the syllogism, treated for its own sake.
• The Two Foundations: Knowledge and Will — why knowing God is necessary in order to want Him.
• Passing from Self-Will to God's Will — the spiritual itinerary of interior conversion.
• The Divine Will — the spirituality of Life in the Divine Will according to Luisa Piccarreta.
• Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration — Union of Our Will with the Will of God (1758). Available online at livres-mystiques.com and in the Œuvres complètes, Vivès ed.
• Saint Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, books VIII and IX (1616) — the distinction between the will of sign and the will of good pleasure, holy indifference.
• Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, E. Cartier translation (1855), notably chapters XLV to L on the will and suffering.
• Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence (18th century) — the practical application of the doctrine of abandonment to every instant.

Text of the thirty-six volumes dictated by Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947) under obedience to her confessors, notably Saint Annibale Maria di Francia, who himself edited the first volumes.