A Reflection for Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
“Now to him who is able to accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine, by the power at work within us, to him be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
Find today’s readings here.
Even though Marianne Williamson had little chance of winning the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020 and 2024, I imagine she campaigned for office to stir up public awareness of issues she cared deeply about: an end to the war on drugs, reparations for slavery and other racial injustices, creating a Department of Peace.
But Williamson’s greatest cultural impact rests on a single paragraph in a single book which has reached a far wider swath of our culture than any issue she ran on. It appears in her 1992 book Return to Love.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Williamson writes. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
She draws out this startling claim that flips the script about the way we typically engage our hopes and dreams.
“It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God….We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.”
This quote has often been attributed to Nelson Mandela, and has appeared everywhere from the walls of yoga studios to college commencement speeches to the movies “Akeelah the Bee” and “Coach Carter.” Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We are afraid to see what we can really do if we set our mind and spirit down to it. We are afraid! We are afraid of being awesome.
I cannot help but wonder if this fear of being powerful goes hand in glove with our natural fear of God. A fear of thoroughly abandoning our lives to the divine. St. Ignatius writes, “How few men realize what God could do for them if only they abandoned themselves to his will.”
In today’s first reading, Paul writes to the Christians at Ephesus to encourage them in their faith. Paul tells the Ephesians that he kneels before God in order that God “grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened in power through his Spirit in the inner self…”
Then he goes further—and this is where things get amped up. Paul describes God as “him who is able to accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine….”
I have always loved this phrase: God who is able to accomplish far more than we could ever desire from God. This is the God we are afraid to get close to; the God that created us to be “brilliant, gorgeous, talented.”
To get specific for a moment, are the things God “is able to accomplish” things like wealth, resources, achievement? Can God, through one channel or another, give us a higher income, a larger home, an advanced degree, a more prestigious job, a marvelous spouse—in short far more than we can ask for or imagine?
Maybe. Why not? If God wills it, he wills it? God may give us these things not to store up treasure for ourselves. And not because we deserve it. But because God intends to do something with those resources. He may even intend us to take them and then straight out give them away. “You have given all to me,” writes Ignatius. “To you Lord, I return it.”
Either way, who are we to deny the Lord’s gifts? Who are we to deny his power? We are children of God. Our power has been there from the start, it is on us to take hold and use it.
