Meditation of the Day
How We Are Brought to Perfection
Allow me once more to recommend it to you and do not grow weary of learning it any more than I shall grow weary of teaching it. I would gladly shout out everywhere: Self-abandonment! Self-abandonment! And again self-abandonment. A self-abandonment without limits or reservations…Because the greatness of God and his sovereign dominion over us demand that all should bow, should be as it were beaten down and annihilated before his supreme majesty. His infinite greatness is wholly out of proportion to our littleness. It dominates everything, contains everything, is everything: for whatever exists and is not God, has received its being from him by creation, receives it indeed at each instant by conservation (which is an incessantly renewed creation), since the being thus received always remains plunged and lost in his bosom.
It follows that God is the Being of all beings; nothing is or lives or subsists except by him and in him. He is He-Who-is, and who is All in all things. Other beings compared with nothingness appear to be something, but compared with God they appear to be nothing. Their being and substance are borrowed, while God exists solely of himself and is no one’s debtor but his own. It is, therefore necessary that since everything necessarily belongs to him, all should return to him, and that his sovereign dominion should be glorified by all the creatures that his hands have made.
Creatures deprived of reason glorify him in their way by following with in violable exactitude and unwearying docility the movement that he communicates to them, but he rightly expects from his reasonable creatures a glory more worthy of himself, which results from their voluntary self-abandonment. How indeed can they make a more just and worthy use of their liberty than in giving back to God all they have received from him and offering him in advance all they may receive from him the future?
– Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. was a French Jesuit, a writer, and a revered spiritual director.
How We Are Brought to Perfection
Allow me once more to recommend it to you and do not grow weary of learning it any more than I shall grow weary of teaching it. I would gladly shout out everywhere: Self-abandonment! Self-abandonment! And again self-abandonment. A self-abandonment without limits or reservations…Because the greatness of God and his sovereign dominion over us demand that all should bow, should be as it were beaten down and annihilated before his supreme majesty. His infinite greatness is wholly out of proportion to our littleness. It dominates everything, contains everything, is everything: for whatever exists and is not God, has received its being from him by creation, receives it indeed at each instant by conservation (which is an incessantly renewed creation), since the being thus received always remains plunged and lost in his bosom.
It follows that God is the Being of all beings; nothing is or lives or subsists except by him and in him. He is He-Who-is, and who is All in all things. Other beings compared with nothingness appear to be something, but compared with God they appear to be nothing. Their being and substance are borrowed, while God exists solely of himself and is no one’s debtor but his own. It is, therefore necessary that since everything necessarily belongs to him, all should return to him, and that his sovereign dominion should be glorified by all the creatures that his hands have made.
Creatures deprived of reason glorify him in their way by following with in violable exactitude and unwearying docility the movement that he communicates to them, but he rightly expects from his reasonable creatures a glory more worthy of himself, which results from their voluntary self-abandonment. How indeed can they make a more just and worthy use of their liberty than in giving back to God all they have received from him and offering him in advance all they may receive from him the future?
– Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. was a French Jesuit, a writer, and a revered spiritual director.
No comments:
Post a Comment