Faith Formation's director advised members of the St. Mary and St.Michael Parishes in Stillwater, Minnesota on how to make our way through the struggle in these hard times to be “saints of heaven someday.”

The key is to unite our will with God’s divine will, he wrote. God uses both active and passive will to cause good to happen, Corey Manning said, the church bulletin reported.

“An example is when He gives us a particular grace through one of the sacraments,” Manning said in the bulletin. “God exercises His passive will by allowing something to happen (but not directly causing it to happen). For instance, when someone uses their free will to sin or act in disobedience to God. God allows this evil because He doesn’t want to take away this great gift of free will from us.”

A saint in training must learn to “surrender to God’s active and passive will,” Manning said.

Manning shared the views of St. Alphonsus de Liguoi through the bulletin: “The essence of perfection is to embrace the will of God in all things, prosperous or adverse. In Prosperity, even sinners find it easy to unite themselves to the divine will; but it takes saints to unite themselves to God’s will when things go wrong and are painful to self-love.”

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