Before the age of lotteries, windfalls, fat cats and billionaires, the human race had a trust in what we called God's Providence. This was our belief that God had everything ordered to a good and proper end (often called the Divine Plan). Providence inspired a trust in many saints and mystics, it was fundamental to religious and monastic life, it inspired us to live in mutually beneficial communities. Providence was a foundation stone of our culture and society.
The idea of God as the world's provident architect is not all that common or popular any more. The larger group in our society demands security at both personal and fiscal levels. That does not leave a whole lot of space for ideas such as benign intervention from the Creator. Yet many people live their lives in a wonderful trusting of God's providence. Standing against a torrent of advertising and pressures to save for the uncertainty of the future, these people live a remarkable and prophetic life within our society. There are more of these people than you may believe. They mark their lives out quietly, they do not force their ideas upon anybody and they enjoy a happiness that shines through their characters.
In the 12th century Meister Eckhart spoke of detachment as that freedom which we can give ourselves from the concerns and burdens of the world. He spoke of this as a positive thing in that it freed people who was detached from drudgery and toil and allowed them freedom to follow higher ideals: "The soul wanders naked into the desert to meet her maker, the greater her nakedness the greater their union."
Three hundred years later Luther spoke of predestination in his Bondage of the Will. In so doing he was one of the first to explore the negative side of Providence. He spoke of how we had, through our sins, turned from God and so we had to face the inevitability of our damnation. God's plan could be just as easily to destroy us as it is to protect us. The idea of Providence had taken a body blow. In the western world it would slowly be beaten into the ground.
Three hundred years later again, Marx laid the death blow to the old ideas of Providence. He railed against the control that could be exercised through such ideas. Religion is the opium of the people! By now Providence had become a promise of pie in the sky when you die, the reward for living an oppressed and undignified human life.
The Providence that died was not the Providence that was born in the Gospels. Providence was never meant to condemn, as Luther would have it, or deprive, as Marx would experience it. Providence abused is certainly a dreadful thing. It was never designed to condemn and was not supposed to be used as a tool to oppress the weaker elements of society. Providence was to provide for all our needs, temporal and spiritual, and so to free us from the worries and concerns that mar our lives today.
Throughout our society there are many joyful persons who live lives of great detachment. They provide for their needs and seldom ask for more. Security for them is a meal to eat, a friend to visit, a home to go to and maybe the price of a pint in the pocket. Whenever I meet these people, they give me a great hope in the wealth of the human spirit. These people are living testimonies to a genuine happiness that we all aspire to and many of us never attain. They are prophets standing against the dominant culture of the 20th century marketplace, real voices that quietly challenge the structures that are digging an impassable abyss between rich and poor. They are the John the Baptists of our day.
As Marx wrote, Bismarck was developing the first modern welfare state. As I write, the Third Way is heralding its demise. St Augustine told us that the role of the state was to provide a climate where a truly Christian life could be lived in freedom. Is the Providence that was derailed at the time of the Reformation to be buried forever? "Store up treasures for yourself in Heaven!" said the Lord. Can Providence ever come to visit if fat Mammon gets wedged in our doorway?
F.MacE.