The End For Which We Were Made

In 1925, Evelyn Underhill conducted a retreat called "The End For Which We Were Made." She concludes with a beautiful exposition of what it means to join the Lord Jesus in His intercession. This is from the book The Ways of the Spirit, edited by Grace Adolphsen Brame:

"So tonight, at the close of our retreat, we think especially of this crowning grace: spiritual charity, sweetening every relationship of life and acting as the soul's self, speaking for other souls in love. Until our prayer flowers thus, we are not real followers of Christ or doing the full work to which the human soul is called. We are stopping halfway.

"The call is, by some means, through countless difficulties and opportunities, to be a living tool with which God can work, a supple instrument. This is only possible if we care to transcend ourselves for God's interests in the world and care with Him in His way--generous, self-giving, unclaimful, and infinitely patient--for all in the world. It is to have something of His wide-spreading love and compassion for misery and sin. It is to cooperate with His saving energy.

"Such intercession involves real sharing of the world's sorrows and self-giving to need. It is fellow-feeling, not merely being sorry for people, but feeling their pain too. Intercession has hardly begun to prevail and exercise its power until the sin and suffering of others enters deeply into our souls as into the very heart of the Christ. We must even be willing to sacrifice inner peace, to give ourselves for the sins of the world, to risk everything of our own, valuing holiness itself as charity, as an increase in the power of saving love. In this great life-imparting prayer, the true prayer of charity, of Christ's caring love and life for others, the soul really moving Godward, carries others with it. This is the real difference between Christian saints and those seekers for God in other religions.

"Now intercession is charity working on supernatural levels for supernatural ends. And if we are to do it, the one thing which matters is that we should care. We can't help anyone until we do care because it is only by love that Spirit penetrates spirit. Think what is implied in the mystery of intercession: God, Infinite Love, the all-penetrating Spirit of spirits, the ocean in which all are bathed. We are united in Him, but not only so. We are mutually penetrated, spiritually moving and influencing each other in ways yet unguessed, and through it all, molded and directed by God.

"In this mysterious interaction of energies called prayer, one tool is put into our hands. Love, will, and desire are three aspects of it. Dynamic love, purged of self-interest, is ours to use on spiritual levels, an engine for working with God on other souls. The saints used it at tremendous cost and with tremendous effect. As their souls expanded and learned adoration, so they went on to the desperate wrestling for souls, exhaustive, creative activity, steady support, redeeming prayer by which human spirits are called to work for God. 'God enabled me to agonize in prayer,' said the saintly David Brainard. 'My soul was drawn out very much for the world. I grasped for a multitude of souls.'

"That gives us a sense of unreachable possibilities, doesn't it? Of deep mysterious energies? Of something not quite covered by what is called intercession? It is because of this that Teresa says, if anyone claims union with God and says they are always in peaceful beatitude, she doesn't believe them. Union of the soul with God is in the Cross, in great sorrow for the sin and pain of the world and longs to redeem and heal. Therefore, real supernatural charity has a wide scope and an infinite object. It spreads and spreads with the growing of the soul in love until it embraces the whole world, for its model is God Himself.

"We have to grasp that if we are really members of the Body of Christ, His redeeming work in this world will be done through us and largely through our prayer. In prayer we offer ourselves as His tools. He uses us to touch and change the lives of human beings. Remember St. Francis' comment that the soul really given to God will not long remain a cosy little oratory, but is far more likely to become a carpenter's shop.

"The call of supernatural charity is not a call to love the nice but the nasty, not the loveable but the unlovely, the hard, the narrow, the embittered, and the tiresome who are so much worse! It is a call to love them until you have made them nicer, to love irrespective of merit or personal preference, and to love those who offend our taste.

"Intercession must be humble. We can't help to redeem what we don't love, where we set up our own standards and are predominantly critical. Think of all the people in the Gospel who would offend our tastes: the stupid, important, over-hasty, self-interested, ungrateful, and those caught up in cheap rationalism; and Martha, Peter, Magdalen, and Thomas. Divine Love goes straight for the undesirable types, meets them on their own ground, reaches them through their character, and makes them His friends. The perfect act of intercession was when Perfect Holiness meekly condescended to wash the Disciples' feet.

"Suppose God would turn from us every time we offended His standard! Instead of that an unmeasurable generosity seeks us at our worst, ordinary, earthy grubbiness and does for us what we cannot do. And that is a task we in our turn must try to take on, imitating from far off this unfailing patience and longing to save. [Actually, I believe that we are not imitating anything but that the Lord Jesus instead has imparted Himself to us and it is His patience and longing to save that we are experiencing in union with Him.]

"Finally, if we are to do such intercessory work, we cannot be swamped by the great ocean of suffering, sin, and need to which we shall be sent. Once again, we must maintain and feed the temper of adoration and trusting adherence. This is the state of prayer, and only in this state can we safely dare to seek to touch other souls and affect them. Moreover, the deeper our adoration, our praise, and our reverence, the more we shall want to do that service and the more we try to do it; and then, the more profoundly joyful and the more utterly self-forgetful our adoration will become. There are two kinds of love: the one that goes out of the world to God and the one that goes with Him into the world to redeem it, to enable us to feed and support one another and in the fully developed soul attains the end for which it was made.

"If we yearn for both those loves, it means a steady increase in our inward detachment from all personal claims and desires and a constant death to self. Yet side by side, it means a steady growth in loving attachment to all souls worthy and unworthy alike. It means a life in which each soul does, to the utmost of its capacity, praise, reverence, and serve God and in so doing expands and exercises to full creative power that with which it is endowed, growing in love, full being, and real spiritual personality."