Father de Caussade Meditation

The whole of spirituality can be expressed in an abridged form in this maxim: we should abandon ourselves purely and entirely to God's design, and thus, with a complete self-forgetfulness, be eternally busied with loving and obeying him, without all these fears, reflections, twistings and turnings and disquietudes which sometimes result from the care of our own salvation and perfection. Since God offers to manage our affairs for us, let us once and for all hand them over to His infinite wisdom in order to occupy ourselves only with Himself and what belongs to Him.

Come, my soul, let us pass with head erect over all that happens within us or outside us, remaining always content with God, content with what He does with us and with what He makes us do. Let us be very careful not to engage imprudently in that multitude of restless reflections which like so many paths leading nowhere present themselves to our mind to make it wander and stray endlessly to our sheer loss: let us pass this labyrinth of our own self-love by vaulting over it and not by following it out in all its interminable details.

Come, my soul, let us pass beyond our languors, our illnesses, our aridities, our inequalities of humor, our weaknesses of mind, the snares of the devil and of men with their suspicions, jealousies, sinister ideas and prejudices. Let us fly like the eagle above all these clouds, our gaze ever fixed on the sun and on its rays, which are our duties. We fell all these miseries, and it is not in our power to be insensible to them, but let us remember that our life is not a life of feeling. Let us live in that higher region of the soul where the will of God produces his eternal operation, ever equal, ever uniform, ever immutable. in that spiritual home where the uncreated, the formless, the ineffable, keeps the soul infinitely removed from the shadows and dust of earth, we remain clam even when our senses are prey of the temptest. We have become independent of the senses; their agitations and disquietudes, their comings and goings and the hundreds of metamorphoses they pass through do not trouble us any more than the clouds that darken the sky for a moment and disappear.