The Providence of God and Lessons in Hope

God is using the ups and downs of life to make us holy. And in the mysterious ways of providence, He is accomplishing much more than that.

By Jim Tonkowich Published on December 28, 2017

“God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform,” says the old William Cowper hymn. Most Christians will affirm that. We’ve seen it in our lives and the lives of others. And yet … it is so easy to forget or ignore or doubt. That’s why a good story is a good reminder.

Planting a Seed

Just before Lent 1960, the sisters at the Cathedral School in Baltimore announced that students in each grade would pray for the conversion of one of the world’s communist dictators. “We third graders,” writes George Weigel, “hoped we’d draw Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev as our designated prayee; he was the only communist dictator any of us have ever heard of.” Instead, their teacher wrote on the blackboard Władysław Gomułka. Gomułka was the communist leader of Poland.

“And please don’t tell me,” Weigel writes, “those weeks of Lenten prayer in 1960 for Comrade Gomułka’s conversion — seemingly unanswered — didn’t have something to do with planting in me a seed that would finally flower into a passion for Polish history and literature — and determination to tell the story of the then-forty-year-old auxiliary bishop of Kraków whom Gomułka and his associates foolishly thought a mystically inclined intellectual they could manipulate.”

John Paul II’s Biography

That former auxiliary bishop of Kraków is the man we remember as Pope St. John Paul II. And George Weigel is the author of Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning, John Paul II’s biography.

Those books are striking in their display of the mysterious workings of God’s providence in the life of Karol Józef Wojtyła. From his birth through the death of his parents, to his love for theater, to his secret theological education during the Nazi Occupation of Poland, to his involvement in the Second Vatican Council, to his elevation to bishop, archbishop, cardinal, and pope, Weigel makes it clear that God was guiding his life, opening doors, and directing his future.

In his new book, Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with John Paul II, Weigel steps back to tell his own story and the providential workings of God that led him to become the pope’s biographer and friend.

The Work of God

Weigel received his theological education amid the doctrinal fads and dissent that followed Vatican II. He found his way through what he calls “theology being held prisoner in an academic hothouse often characterized by boredom with the very mystery of being, skepticism about the human capacity to know anything, and moral relativism.” In doing so, he developed the orthodox understanding of Christianity that John Paul, through very different circumstances, also had.

His friendship with Richard John Neuhaus, his time spent at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars along with friendships forged there, and his continuing work at the Ethics & Public Policy Center form a narrative of the providential and the unexpected.

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And that narrative led to December 6, 1995. Weigel and Neuhaus were at a conference in Rome when Weigel received a phone call from Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, Pope John Paul II’s secretary. “Come over for dinner tonight and bring Father Neuhaus with you.”

At dinner, “completely out of the blue, the 263rd Successor of St. Peter abruptly and forcefully said to Father Neuhaus, while glancing at me, ‘You must force him to do it! You must force him to do it!’ ‘It,’ of course was the biography, and ‘him’ was me.”

Trace the work of God in Weigel’s life up to that point and it could not be otherwise.

God’s Mysterious Ways

The providential unfolding continued during Weigel’s research for the books. For example, “In July 2007,” he writes, “Fr. Maciej Zięba… gave me a dossier of documents in which he thought I ‘might be interested.’ That was an understatement.”

Fr. Zięba gave him copies of Polish and East German secret police documents related to John Paul II beginning with his appointment as bishop through his pontificate. Those, and documents he received later, allowed him to document the Communists’ ceaseless undercover war with the Catholic Church and the Polish pope — a war that had, to that point, gone unnoticed. (Read a short version here or at length in The End and the Beginning. The true story makes spy novels seem trite.)

Hearing the ways in which God’s mysterious plan unfolded in the lives of George Weigel and John Paul II, for me at least, serves as a vital reminder. The seeming jumble of experiences, friendships, successes and disappointments has a point, a direction and a final end, even if we can’t see it just now. At bare minimum, God is using the ups and downs of life to make us holy. And in the mysterious ways of providence, He is accomplishing much more than that.

“It was a life of incredible drama,” Weigel concludes about John Paul II’s life, “beyond the imagination of any Hollywood scriptwriter. Yet there was a common thread in it — his rock-solid confidence in God’s guidance of his life. That confidence … made him the freest man in the world.”

May his tribe increase.

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