tip Magnificat
From Abandonment to Divine Providence
At the beginning of each day, and of meditation, Mass, and Communion, declare to God that you desire to belong to Him entirely, and that you will devote yourself wholly to acquiring the spirit of prayer and of the interior life.
Make it your chief study to conform yourself to the will of God even in the smallest things, saying in the midst of the most annoying contradictions and with the most alarming prospects for the future: “My God, I desire with all my heart to do Your holy will, I submit in all things and absolutely to Your good pleasure for time and eternity; and I wish to do this, Oh my God, for two reasons; first: because You are my Sovereign Lord and it is but just that Your will should be accomplished; secondly: because I am convinced by faith, and by experience that Your will is in all things as good and beneficent as it is just and adorable, while my own desires are always blind and corrupt; blind, because I know not what I ought to desire or to avoid; corrupt, because I nearly always long for what would do me harm. Therefore, from henceforth, I renounce my own will to follow Yours in all things; dispose of me, Oh my God, according to Your good will and pleasure.”
-- Father Jean-Pierre De Caussade, S.J.
3 comments:
This is very similar to another daily prayer from Saint Francis Xavier that I gleaned from MAGNIFICAT, Aramis. What I find sad is that it betokens an interiority that is nearly impossible when persons allow themselves to be swept into the maelstrom of pop culture (for want of a better phrase).
From my own experience, it seems to me that when that happens, it is like the experience of physically entering a crowd: one's sense of individuality, moral, and emotional quotient all are diminished to the level of the crowd. Scrounging around the internet all day, following gossip and celebrity tabloids, daytime and prime time television - it is all just like entering a crowd.
"Be still, and know that I am God" [Ps 46,10] is the antidote. Happy are those who don't need a heart attack, by grace, to find it out.
Yes, I am with you Ath.
I like your way of placing us phyically in the situation of entering a crowd. What I often think, going beyond the physical, and is that a great deal of meditation, discernment and pondering should happen centering in on the 2 words I pulled out of Father Jean-Pierre's reflection, "my" and "own" - especially when we put these 2 words together.
For me, it is here that Girardian thought has challenged and brought me to a new sense of being. It opened me to a much deeper level of contemplation on the desires of God through the life, death and RESURRECTION of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. I came to see that when I am not in sync with Christ (where the Church is my balance or center point) I am NEVER (like new-agers want to believe) off un-influenced by others - somehow alone and inside myself, as if I have "my own" desires, but rather, I am always under the influence of others.
Our God given gift of freedom only plays out when we to choose the desires of God, being truly human. But if we do not choose His Desire for us, we fall back into the role of human violence laid out by structures of the old sacred systems (even if these systems have been secularized over many hunderds of years).
If I were looking to get tattooed, I'd have this passage on my forearms.
What a great meditation on "Thy will be done".
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