Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in God’s Answer to Prayer

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission” (Heb 5:7). In the hour of Jesus’s agony in Gethsemane, when he needed assurance that the cross was indeed his Father’s will, he was strengthened for the ordeal by an angel (Lk 3:9–46).

                  Jesus had doing God’s will on his short list of essentials in the life of faith. He said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Doing God’s will makes us part of Jesus’s new family. “Who are my mother and brothers? . . . Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 7:21 and 12:48–50).

If doing the will of God is so important, we can be assured from the start that God has a path that enables us to find his will. It must be a path so vast and universal that all persons of faith can find it, a path that contains within itself every other worthy path.

Watch the 4:16 video or listen to the podcast episode.

Sometimes we immediately and intuitively know the will of God; sometimes it takes searching before we get our intuition. And finding the will of God often involves a process in which we seek, find, discern, then decide and do God’s will. This blogpost clarifies the problem of discernment, adds a bit of philosophy, and solves the problem with three qualities of God—truth, beauty, and goodness.

When Jesus Prayed

Often the human Jesus did not need prayer in order to know the Father’s will. As proposed in the previous chapter, fully mature righteous character—the kind of perfection that we can achieve in this life—integrates heavenly values with earthly realities. Jesus’s intuitive insight into his Father’s will was based upon his excellent knowledge of people and situations plus knowing God intimately, which often included awareness of the relevant divine value(s) to be actualized. For example, in the domain of truth, how much content communicated is enough? In the arena of beauty, would a parable or a direct teaching be more fitting? In the realm of goodness, does a situation call for patient waiting or courageous action?

But sometimes Jesus’s wisdom was not enough to come promptly to an intuitive grasp of what to do. Then he would often have taken his longings and problems directly to God in prayer. I imagine an adolescent Jesus praying, opening himself in profound receptivity, allowing God to add to, and revise, his human wisdom.

A full prayer life includes quick prayers and long ones. Jesus probably prayed briefly and silently when no one else was aware of it. But from time to time, he would withdraw to a lonely place and pray. Sometimes he spent all night in prayer. He seems to have truly enjoyed communing with his Father for hours at a time. It is only logical that prayer to know God’s will was part of Jesus’s agenda in communing with his Father. After all, Jesus was energized by doing his Father’s will. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” (Lk 5:16, 6:12; Jn 4:34).

Prayer is different from seeking counsel from a human friend. Instead of a face-to-face conversation, it is a human mind and soul interacting with the spirit of God. Some people disregard the communication gap between humankind and God. They send forth lots of quick prayers and often assume that the next impressive input that enters their mind comes from God. Others are overwhelmed by the gap. They may be so anxious to be certainabout God’s answer that they agonize needlessly. Jesus lived and taught a better way.

From the Problem of Discernment to a Solution

When we pray and expect an answer, things happen that some people interpret as divine hints, winks, or nudges. A-ha moments come, serendipities, and spiritual experiences; sometimes things happen which we interpret as acts of God, but they could equally be coincidences that were foreseen but not arranged by God. And sometimes impressive inputs come from the subconscious mind.

Once we start working on a problem in the conscious mind, the unconscious mind may well go to work at the same time. It can draw on memories of quotations from scripture and other knowledge and experience of which we are not presently conscious. The mind may speak to us in the second person and give commands. An input generated by the human mind is not as wise as an answer from God, but it is often a significant improvement on what we had been consciously thinking previously.

The problem of discerning God’s will is widely recognized. Some resources for discernment are scripture, which must be translated, interpreted, and applied to the situation at hand; tradition, which is mixed; the judgment of the religious community or friends in faith, who can make mistakes; reason, which can be misused; and the test of time, which is not ideal either. The goal of fully consulting all of them is impossibly high, and not even in combination are they guaranteed to give us the divine answer. But they are worth taking seriously, because they afford a variety of perspectives and relax the tendency to overestimate our own judgment.

If there were a set of absolute criteria for determining the will of God, standards which the human intellect could apply without fail, there would be no adventure, no transformation, no soul growth, no stretching ourselves to live in a more heavenly way, and no fun.

When we struggle to find the will of God, it helps to recall that we already know a lot about it. For example, we can bring to mind the universal commands to love, to be merciful, to treat others as we want others to treat us, and to become perfect (to be our best, as we are able, one day at a time).

Next, the path to the solution to the problem of discernment leads through philosophy. Philosophy has an important role to play in sharpening our discernment. The word “philosopher” means “a friend of wisdom.” The ideal is to live in the light of the wisdom we already have, to recognize when we need more, and then to seek for what we need until we find it. Philosophy can contribute to the larger process of seeking for God’s will, because seeking, finding, discerning wisdom, and living wisely are also part of God’s will.

In the Greco-Roman culture that would have stimulated Jesus’s philosophical thinking, many thinkers sought to develop philosophy in a more comprehensive way. For some of them the goal was to create a universal synthesis that would culminate in a philosophy of living. In the ancient world and since, philosophical striving helped thinkers develop a variety of specific skills. At its best, philosophy replaces confusion with clarity, sharpens our capacities for intuition and insight, interprets meanings wisely, reasons logically, synthesizes concepts coherently, and knows when to be quiet because it would be unwise to say more.

Science, philosophy, and spirituality seek the kinds of truths that pertain to their own realm of matter, mind, or spirit. But all truth is God’s truth, and philosophy finds meaning in all three domains. Truth has a spiritual center, a scientific periphery, and a philosophical bridge between the two.

It takes work to harmonize science and religion. For example, psychologist Sigmund Freud used his brilliant mind to criticize the concept of love for the neighbor. Consider a few of his criticisms, for example, about not becoming emotionally involved with everyone we meet, not trusting people blindly, and having psychologically healthy ways of dealing with our own aggression. We could foolishly say to ourselves that science has shown neighbor love to be a bad idea. Or we could transform these criticisms into warnings to make our love more intelligent and wise.

The following discussion of truth, beauty, and goodness is another example of philosophical interpretation. We cannot tell how much Jesus participated in the philosophy of his day; he probably did not organize his discernment as I do. Nevertheless, with a smile, I cannot help thinking that he must have agreed with some ideas that I regard as insightful.

Truth, beauty, and goodness in God’s answer to prayer

Truth, beauty, and goodness are qualities of God and values that we can live. I regard them as divine values because we find them on all levels. In God, in the mind, and in the material world, we can discover truth, find and create beauty, and participate in doing what is good. These universal values enable the Creator Parent and the creature child to share a common language.

I see truth, beauty, and goodness as a ladder that God puts down from heaven to earth so that there is something we can understand that enables us to climb higher. These values speak to our thinking, feeling, and doing. If a seeming answer to prayer feels good, but is intellectually problematic, or appeals intellectually but doesn’t feel right, or can’t be put into practice, then we can wrestle with it more or simply reject it.

God is the source of these three values; and “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). I regard these values as forming a path to love and as being essential ingredients in love. The highest truths are truths of love, and love is the most fulfilling beauty and the greatest good.

                  Truth, beauty, and goodness prepare us for all manner of situations in which we must decide and do. God does not call on the phone or materialize a print-out or a roadmap. But faith receives guidance that is sufficient to clarify our choice. Then the decision launches the doing—the course of action.

                  As God responds to our prayer, the Creator does not put the three values on a plate like a pineapple, a banana, and a mango. Instead, God gives a blend, a smoothie, that we can find delicious without having to ask about these three values.

I find that a response to prayer that blends truth, beauty, and goodness can include:

• Clear intuition or insight into the truth of the situation being prayed about
• Moral insight into the goodness of the course of action that opens up
• An intuitive feeling, peaceful or rejoicing, in response to the beauty of seeingthese values come together

In such insights and intuitions, we discern God’s values.

                  Amazingly, these same qualities of clarity (truth), moral satisfaction (goodness), and peace (beauty) can come after quick prayers.

                  Why then should we take time to explore truth, beauty, and goodness? For the same reason that Jesus prayed to the Father at length. It might seem that he could have contented himself with quick prayers. But longer periods of time in prayer cultivate the mind in such a way that our quick prayers are more likely to come closer to what God wants us to find. Otherwise, quick prayers might seem a little bit like a game.

                  In the game of darts, players take turns trying to throw their darts so that they stick in the center of the dartboard. But most of the time they hit the dartboard somewhere else; sometimes they miss the dartboard altogether. If I were going to create a dartboard, the center would symbolize doing God’s will, in an ideal way—as Jesus did—and the surrounding circles would represent human approximations to that goal that are less divine.

Here is the solution that I propose to the problem of discerning the will of God. Because divine values are woven together in religious experience, we ideally need to reflect in order to distinguish them in a response to prayer. Our thinking finds truth in it; our feeling finds beauty in it; and we find goodness in its guidance for our decision. When we have been wholehearted in our prayer process (even a quick one when that’s what we have time for), we may rest content with the best that we have been realistically able to find.

In loving mercy, God works with us to help make the best of our decision. The Parent accepts and adopts the child’s best effort. We can relax and rejoice.Discernment doesn’t have to hit the bullseye; it just has to hit the target.

Discernment does not mean intuiting whether the source of an impressive input is human or divine. Discernment means intuiting truth, beauty, and goodness.

It is our choice to explore this frontier. The more we try it out, the more interesting it becomes.

This blogpost draws from chapter 7 of Jeffrey Wattles, A Taste of Joy and Liberty: A Philosopher Encounters the Gospel of Jesus.

Photo credit: Oleg Alexandrov. The Thinker by Rodin at the Cantor Arts Center of Stanford University. Wikimedia Commons.