Introduction to the Devout Life · 111 of 120

Part V, Ch IX: Reflections Suitable to the Renewal of Good Resolutions

AFTER you have made this self-examination, and having conferred with some holy director as to your shortcomings and their remedies, you will do well to pursue the following considerations, taking one daily as a meditation, and giving to it the time usually so spent; always making the same preparation and kindling the same affections as you learnt to use before meditating in Part I. Above all, placing yourself in the Presence of God, and earnestly asking His Grace to confirm you and keep you stedfast in His Holy Love and Service.

Insight

Consider how noble and excellent a thing your soul is. The first consideration of the renewal sequence is anthropological — what kind of being are you that you should be undertaking this? De Sales’s answer follows the medieval tradition: the soul is endowed with understanding, capable of knowing God; with will, capable of loving God; with affection that can find no rest in any finite creature. The line about no rest in any earthly creation, every drop of water it tries to drink leaving it more thirsty echoes Augustine’s famous opening of the Confessions — our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. The Hindu tradition states the same restlessness as the soul’s native discontent with the finite, requiring brahman as its only satisfying object.Augustine, Confessions I.1; cf. Mundaka Upanishad II.2 on the soul’s longing for the infinite.