Providence

God can intervene on our behalf in two ways:  He can create a miracle, as He did when He opened the Red Sea, or He can arrange 10,000 circumstances to meet our need.  The latter is called Providence.  It is no less a miracle than the opening of the Red Sea, but it is not as dramatic. 

Yesterday at Mass, the deacon told a story about a five-year-old boy who loved to play the piano.  His mother took him to a piano concert given by a famous Polish pianist, thinking he would enjoy it.  While waiting for the concert to begin, the mother began talking to a friend of hers, and the younster slipped out of his seat near the stage, climbed up onto the stage and sat at the waiting piano.  His mother was horrified when she turned around to see him playing chopsticks on the stage.  The audience was laughing and enjoying the impromptu performance -- until the maistro himself entered the stage from the wings.  The audience gasped, thinking the great pianist would be angry.  But the musician simply put his arms around the young boy and began to improvise beautiful melodies to accompany the boy's playing.

That is how I think of Divine Providence:  the arms of God encircling our feeble performance in this world to make it work on our behalf and for the good of others.  Unless His arms hold us up, there is nothing we can do to make our lives work.  But fortunately, "the everlasting arms" never leave or abandon us, even when we falter and fail.  Bishop Sheen once told a story about a musician who played a wrong note in a great symphony.  That out-of-place note, Sheen said, could never be retracted; it would remain forever a wrong note in the strastosphere, where sound as we understand it never disappears. 

But, Sheen said, if the Great Composer takes that note and makes it the opening note of an entire new symphony, it is no longer out-of-place, but the prelude to a new and greater opus.  That is how Providence works in our lives:  what we thought was our greatest failure becomes instead the introduction to a whole new work.  The arms of God encircle us, to carry us forward.

When Jesus entered the synagogue in Caparnum, He opened the scroll to Isaiah 61: "The Year of the Lord's Favor" and read:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,

because the Lord has anointed me....

to comfort all who mourn

and provide for those who grieve in Zion--

to bestow on them a crown of beauty

instead of ashes,

the oil of gladness

instead of mourning,

and a garment of praise

instead of a spirit of despair.

If we know Romans 8:28 -- and we know that God makes all things work together for good unto them who are called according to His purpose---and if we lean into that truth, we also believe in Divine Providence -- the arms of God encircling our lives, to make a beautiful symphony out of our "chopsticks."