God Of Intervention

A wildfire in Venezuela during a drought Wikipedia

I

am reminded of a story told by Fr Niphot Thianwiharn, a Thai diocesan priest who has spent many years accompanying ethnic minority communities in northern Thailand. His experience offers us two beautiful images for understanding how God intervenes in our lives: fire and water.

First, we often want God to intervene like fire.

Fr Niphot described his first five years of ministry among ethnic minority communities as very militant—a passionate fighter for a belief or change. He wanted to do things for the people, solve problems, change situations, and make things happen. Then one of the elders gave him an image. He told him, “Father, you are working like a fire on the mountain.” During the daytime, everyone can see the smoke; at night, everyone can see the flames. Something is clearly happening. But when you return afterward, what remains? Only ashes.

I think this is also how we sometimes want God to intervene in the situations we face. We want fire. Think of an advocacy to which we have given so much of ourselves. We organized people, spoke out, and worked for years hoping that something would finally change. For a time, there was energy and momentum—like a fire sweeping across the mountain. But then the campaign ends the problem remains. Looking at what seems to be left—the ashes, we are tempted to say, “After all that hard work, nothing changed.”

Perhaps this is also how we sometimes judge God's intervention. We look for visible results. We want the problem solved, the system changed, the goal achieved. And when that does not happen, we wonder whether all our work—and even all our prayer—made any difference at all.

Perhaps today's Gospel (Lk 11:5-13) invites us to enlarge our understanding of what God's intervention looks like. There is nothing wrong with asking God for what we deeply desire. Jesus himself tells us to ask, seek, and knock. There are indeed moments when God intervenes like fire. But if fire is the only kind of intervention we recognize, we may fail to notice another way God has been answering our prayer all along.

Second, God can intervene like water.

Fr Niphot then asked the elder, “How else should I work with the people?” The elder answered, “Father, you have to work like the water that comes down from the sky and enters the earth.”

Water enters the earth almost unnoticed. Yet the water is not doing nothing. It reaches the roots, nourishes the trees, and eventually the whole forest becomes lush and green. Its intervention is quiet, but its effects are everywhere.

We begin prayer wanting something to immediately change. We keep asking, seeking, knocking. This helps us understand why, for St Ignatius of Loyola, prayers of petition and intercession make sense. We should never hesitate to ask, to request, and even to beg God for the grace we need.

But somewhere along the way, perhaps another kind of asking, seeking and knocking is being asked of us. I call this asking, seeking and knocking from within. What changes is not the other person, or the situation. Change happens not in the outside. What changes is our own hearts.

The situation outside may not immediately change, but we are no longer quite the same person standing inside it. The situation may remain the same, but something in us changes. We become stronger, calmer, or more accepting. God may not change what is happening around us, but he can change how we face it.

Third, sometimes we need fire; sometimes we need water. Perhaps what we need is the wisdom to know when we need fire and when we need water.

Both interventions have their own strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes we need fire because something has to be done. When someone is being treated unjustly, we may need to speak up. Sometimes love means acting rather than simply waiting.

But there are also times when doing too much can make things worse. We become impatient. We try to fix people or make things turn out according to what we think should happen. At such moments, perhaps we need to become more like water: to listen, to stay, to give someone time, and to allow change to happen slowly from within.

This gives us another way of understanding prayer. Prayer is not only asking God to intervene, for God is always a God of intervention; prayer asks more of us, he is asking how we can take part in that intervention. God does not only answer prayers, God sends to us the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps this is why Jesus ultimately promises us the Holy Spirit. We need more than an answer to our prayers; we need the Spirit to help us recognize how God is already at work and how we are being invited to become part of the answer.

Let us pray:

“Lord, give me your Spirit to let go and let God. Show me when I need to act like fire, when I need to be patient like water, and when I simply need to trust that you are already at work.” Amen. Fr JM Manzano SJ