The Will of God in Other Words

There can hardly be a better practice in the spiritual life than that of meeting everything as an expression of the will of God.... Nothing furthers the supernatural point of view so effectively as the cultivation of such a habit. It can be seen as an extension of the Our Father, as an identification with the disposition of Christ, as the application of ’I came not to do my own will but the will of my Father who is in heaven’ to our own human concerns.

With Dom Hubert van Zeller’s characteristically well-grounded insights, The Will of God in Other Words tackles a question that most people deeply desire to know the answer to: how do I respond to God’s will? What does abandonment to His will look like?

Taking his cue from the saints and doctors of the Church, van Zeller lays out the program for following God’s will. He traces the fine line demanded by the attitude of abandonment in our spiritual life while outlining the various practical heresies that one can fall into when seeking to surrender to God’s will. Far from any Quietistic approach that responds to God’s will without any action or responsibility, and far from an activist or Pelagian approach that responds with only action and effort, van Zeller gives here a concise, clear, and supremely helpful treatise on the spiritual tradition of abandoning oneself to God’s will. For all who desire the peace that surpasses understanding, granted to all who live and move abandoned to God’s loving guidance, this book is an essential first step, and more, towards that end.

Born in British-controlled Egypt, Dom Hubert van Zeller (1905-1984) was a Benedictine monk of Downside Abbey in Bath, England, where he was educated. Of his scholastic career he said that he ＂passed no examinations-merely by-passed them.＂ The author of numerous books ranging from scriptural commentary to fiction and biography, he was also renowned as a minimalist sculptor and cartoonist. He was a friend of Ronald Knox and of Evelyn Waugh, who described Dom Hubert’s writings as ＂characterized by vitality and elegance.＂