In a beautiful letter to his friend Nghi, written 11 January 1948, Marcel Văn writes on one of his constant and deep themes: the union of wills that come about as we journey towards Jesus. Contemplation, love of God, suffering things divine: all of this implies a union, increasingly continual, of human and divine wills. Little Văn’s formula here is very simple:

If you know to obey, God will follow, in everything, your will.

Is it a surprising formula?

Marcel simply says that, if we obey, our will is united to Jesus’ and the whole Trinity’s. Thus, if we are obeying and really knowing this union of wills, then, if we ask for something, then God will not say no.

He won’t say no. Why? Because in this case, what we ask is really something he wills also. After all, we’re truly obedient.

Later in the same letter, Marcel adds  – perhaps innocently unaware that he is claiming aloud that he “knows to obey” –

I entrust all this business to Jesus, keeping the certitude that he can refuse me nothing.

Jesus will refuse him nothing. Because, though he is terribly weak, he really, genuinely, truthfully wants what Jesus wants. (In fact, this teaching is consistent with the expressed experience of Saint Hildegard and Saint Teresa and of the more elaborated doctrine of Saint John of the Cross: when the two wills become as one, the Trinity will refuse nothing.)

This is a profound mystery hidden at the heart of the Our Father: “Our Father… your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” The will of a father, a Father who is Love, is to give everything to his children and to meet them where they are. They are weak. It is enough for them to just want his will to be done in everything. Then everything they ask can be accorded them to support them in their weakness. When our will is united to our Father’s, how can he say no? Because we already pray that his will is done here-below, and this is what he, in his infinite mercy and generosity, wants also.

But, all that said, Marcel points out elsewhere,

There is nothing more beautiful than to do the will of the one who is loved.

And why would God leave all the beauty for us? Why wouldn’t God do something beautiful, too? There is nothing more beautiful, too, for the Trinity, than to do the will of the one who is loved.