Today’s Chapter: Thy Will Be Done
Chapter 7: Of Humility (vv.19-23)
We are, indeed, forbidden to do our own will by Scripture, which saith to us: turn away from thine own will. And so too we beg of God in prayer that His will may be done in us. Rightly therefore are we taught not to do our own will, if we take heed to the warning of Scripture: “There are ways which to men seem right, but the ends thereof lead to the depths of hell”; or, again, when we tremble at what is said of the careless: “They are corrupt and have become abominable in their pleasures.” And in regard to the desires of the flesh, we must believe that God is always present to us, as the prophet saith to the Lord: “O Lord, all my desire is before Thee.”
Yesterday presented us with a florilegium of texts to remind us that God sees us everywhere, as the 49th Instrument of Good Works teaches. Today’s portion of the 1st Degree can be seen as a commentary on the 59th Instrument: ‘Not to fulfil the desires of the flesh: to hate one’s own will.’ Again there is a florilegium of Scriptural verses that the monk can meditate and repeat to himself, taken this time from Ecclesiasticus, from Proverbs, and from Psalms 13 and 37. Most important of all, however, is the indirect citation of the Lord’s Prayer, which Saint Benedict simply refers to as ‘Prayer’, saying that in oratione we ask that God’s will be done in us.
Thus, the continual awareness of God and His Presence leads to a concrete choice to prefer the will of God to one’s own desires. This will be further unpacked in the 2nd through 4th Degrees of Humility, but it is already present here. Our Lady’s constant remembrance of God and of His gaze upon her has as its practical consequence a continual readiness to do His will. Thus, decades before Our Lord taught us to say fiat voluntas tua (Mt 6:10), she provided the model for us in her fiat mihi (Lk 1:38), which made possible at that same moment the Incarnate Son’s own Ecce venio ut faciam voluntatem tuam (Heb 10:7).
Madre Cànopi comments on the practical import of this degree:
The base of the ladder of humility rested for Mary on the solid pavement of her house at Nazareth, where she fulfilled all the most simple and humble services of daily life with a spirit of faith, of piety, of adoration, of love for God the Father, for Jesus—of Whom she was at the same time mother and disciple—and for Joseph, who within the holy Family represented in a certain manner all just men, of good will. Mary reached the top of the ladder when, on Calvary, she accepted humbly the incomprehensible will of the Father, when, in the experience of total darkness, ‘she stood’ [Cf. Jn 19:25] by the Cross, participating in the extreme humiliation and total failure of Jesus. There, the heart of the Mother was immolated together with the Heart of the Son. (Anna Maria Cànopi, Nel ‘Sì’ di Maria, translation by a Benedictine monk, pp. 48)
The 1st Degree, then, implies accepting God’s will in our deeds, even to the point of sacrifice. The words of Sacred Scripture that Saint Benedict provides us with can fortify us when the sacrifice is costly. We can well imagine Mary drawing out some of these verses from the storehouse of her memory, saying at the foot of the Cross, Domine, ante te est omne desiderium meum [O Lord, before Thee is all my desire], and, above all, uniting herself to the words of ‘the Prayer’ which her Son had pronounced the night before in Gethsemani, fiat voluntas tua.
