The Best Advice I Have Heard All Week
Perfection consists in doing the will of God, not in understanding his designs.
– Fr. Jean-Pierre de Cassaude, S.J.
To be present, to be humble enough to receive God, to be truly intentional in this moment – not ruminating about the past or worrying about the future – to live fully this knife’s edge of now, to listen openly and see clearly the one who is vividly in front of you. That is what it means to abandon oneself to Divine Providence.
Or as Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussaude so eloquently observed,
Come, foolish souls, you who have not an atom of sensible devotion, you too who possess no talent nor even the rudiments of education, you who cannot understand a single spiritual term, who stand astonished at the eloquence of the learned whom you admire; come, and I will teach you a secret which will place you far beyond these clever minds. I will make perfection so easy to you that you will find it everywhere and in everything. I will unite you to God, and make you walk hand in hand with him for the moment that you begin practicing what I will teach you. Come, not to study a map of the spiritual country, but to possess it, to walk in it at your ease without fear of losing your way. Come, not to study the theory of divine grace, nor to find out what it has accomplished in the past and still continues to accomplish; but to become simply subject to its operations. It is not necessary that you should understand what it has said to others, nor to repeat the words intended only for them and which you have overheard, but you, yourself, will receive from it what is best for you.
Peace.
