“Our lives are not, finally, about us, and thanks be to God for it. We are part of what Urs von Balthasar calls the “theo-drama,” the theatre of God’s glory. We are not the director of the great play; we are but actors in it, struggling to follow the stage directions of the Spirit. We find ourselves precisely by surrendering to the momentum and meaning of the drama whose ultimate contours and final resolution can be only dimly glimpsed. In any well-written play, even the minor characters have an essential purpose, and sometimes those players who seem least significant for the bulk of the drama emerge, by the end, as the decisive figures. So it is in the theo-drama. Every human being has been created, our faith wagers, for participation in the play that God writes, and no one’s role is unimportant. In fact, those people who seem most weighty in the ordinary judgment of the world – presidents, epic poets, generals, business moguls – might be, in the context of the theo-drama, only bit players, while, on the contrary, those who seem least significant to the world might, in the end, be the stars of God’s production. The essential task for those in any drama is to listen to the director and to trust in his vision. When one player attempts to upstage another or reinterpret her role, he upsets the delicate balance that the director wants to achieve. So in the theo-drama, we must obey the promptings of the spiritus rector and accept the role that his love holds out to us, even if it seems less than satisfying from our perspective. Since we cannot see the whole of the stage or grasp the complexity of the script, we must surrender to the goodness and wisdom of the director who sees and grasps both.”
From Robert Barron’s book ‘And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation’ (p 173-4)
Spiritual Encouragement: A Christian Journey 