Abandonment; or, Absolute Surrender to Divine Providence · 6 of 35

Book First, Chapter V. Reading and other Exercises only sanctify us in so far as they are the Channels of the Divine Action.

All our science consists in recognizing God’s will in regard to the present moment. All reading pursued in any other spirit than that of submission to the order of God is injurious. The will of God, the order of God, is the grace which works in the depths of our hearts by means of our readings and by all our other works. Without it our readings are but shadows, vain appearances, which, coming to us devoid of the vivifying virtue of the order of God, serve only to empty the heart by the very plenitude they cause in the mind.

The virtue of this divine will flowing into the soul of a simple, ignorant girl by means of suffering or ordinary actions, effects in the depths of her heart this mysterious work of the supernatural Being without filling her mind with any idea likely to awaken pride; while the proud man who studies spiritual books only through curiosity, and does not unite his reading to the will of God, receives into his mind the letter without the spirit, and becomes colder and more hardened than ever.

The order of God, His divine will, is the life of the soul under whatever appearances the soul receives it or applies it to herself.

Whatever may be the relation of the divine will to the mind, it nourishes the soul, and unceasingly strengthens her growth by giving her each moment what is best for her. Nor is one thing more efficacious than another in producing these happy effects; no, it is simply the duty of the present moment which comes to us by the order of God. That which was best for us in the past moment is no longer best for us, for it is stripped of the will of God, which has passed on to other things from which it creates for us the duty of the present moment; and it is this duty, under whatever appearance it is manifested, which will now most perfectly sanctify our souls.

If the divine will make reading the duty of the present moment, the reading will effect His mysterious work in the depths of the soul. If, in obedience to the divine will, we leave the reading for the duty of contemplation, this duty will create the new man in the depths of the heart, and reading would then be injurious and useless. If the divine will withdraw us from contemplation to hear confessions or to other duties, and that during a considerable time, these duties form Jesus Christ in the depths of the heart, and all the sweetness of contemplation would only serve to banish Him.

The order of God is the fulness of all our moments. It flows under a thousand different appearances which, successively becoming our present duty, form, increase, and complete the new man in us, in all the fulness which the divine wisdom has destined for us. This mysterious growth of Jesus Christ in us is the work produced by the order of God; it is the fruit of His grace and of His divine will.

This fruit, as we have said, is germinated, increased, and nourished by the succession of our present duties filled with the virtue of this same divine will.

In fulfilling these duties we are always sure of possessing the “better part,” for this holy will is itself the better part. We have but to yield to it, blindly abandon ourselves to it with perfect confidence. It is infinitely holy, infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, for souls which unreservedly hope in it, which love and seek but it alone, and which believe with unfaltering faith that what it assigns to each moment is best without seeking elsewhere for more or less, and without pausing to consider the relation of material things with the order of God, which is the seeking of pure self-love.

The will of God is the essential, the reality and virtue, of all things; it is that which adapts and renders them suitable to the soul.

Without it all is emptiness, nothingness, falsehood, the empty husk, the letter without the spirit, vanity, death.

The will of God is the health, the life, the salvation of soul and body, whatever its manifestation or ways of reaching us.

Therefore we must not judge of the virtue of things by the relations they bear to mind or body, for these relations are unimportant. It is the will of God alone which gives to all things, whatever they may be, the power to form Jesus Christ in the depth of our hearts. We must frame no laws for this will and place no limit to its action, for it is all-powerful.

Whatever the ideas which fill the mind, whatever the feelings which the body experiences, were it for the mind but distractions and trouble, for the body but sickness and death, the divine will nevertheless is ever for the present moment the life of body and soul; for both one and the other, whatever their condition, are sustained by it alone. Bread without it is poison; and through it poison becomes a salutary remedy. Without it, books but confuse and trouble us; with it, darkness is turned into light. It is the wisdom, the truth, of all things. In all things it gives us God: and God is the infinite Being who holds the place of all things to the soul which possesses Him.