In the Latin Rite, today the Gospel reading is this:

 [Jesus said,] ‘To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another,
“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not weep.”
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.’ (Lk 7:31–35)

I once pondered for a long time what this could mean. It is obvious that those complaining should not complain about Saint John the Baptist and our Lord Jesus. But… why? What is the reason? What is the reason that they should have known?

I think the answer is that, simply, we cannot predict, by any purely human means, what the  fully good, perfect to do for a particular person in a particular situation is. It’s beyond our powers. Only Faith, Hope, and Love are above reason, without destroying it; and only the Gifts of the Holy Spirit can prompt us beyond our conscious activity and deliberation (even conscious activity and deliberation in Faith, Hope, and Love). Only the Holy Spirit can blow and guide the ship completely lovingly and truly. The whole edifice of the spiritual life – when it develops in relationship with the Three who are so much higher than our ability to think consciously, our ability to deliberate and decide what should be done by our own reason – is oriented towards and by the divine Wisdom.

And this divine Wisdom guides and goes where she pleases. And the variety of the saints and the variety of the times in their lives – which they cannot try to put down and decide reasonably without doing violence to God’s own ways – are what proves Wisdom right. She is vindicated in all her children, in all her providence, in all her gentle breezes that take us from one port to another.

This shows she is alive, more alive than the life of this world. She hurtles upwards, downwards, left, right, spiralling, tumbling, moving. She’s alive. Thus, she is of the living God. Thus, she is vindicated in the end.

If, like the complainers in today’s Gospel, we have any temptation to complain and try to decide what any one person ought to do – beyond a suggestion or order to see what the result is in spiritual guidance – then we have a grave spiritual fault. We have a blindness. This kind of fault, to decide the ways of providence because we see some of the good, is a real fault. It needs to be cleaned up in what Saint John of the Cross calls a “dark night of the spirit” (the second dark night, the second part of the long, dark night). God will clean us up. How? By making become more reliant on his grace and his inspirations and less reliant on our own judgment. That is, by crossing the threshold so that our entire regime of life is better and more fully and more accurately described as a vindication of Wisdom in all her children.