…he has placed his confidence in God alone and has accepted in advance all that his good Master may be pleased to ordain. This obviously is not the peace of paradise, but it is the most perfect peace possible here below. God does not will that we should enjoy absolute repose here on earth or enduring happiness. We cannot avoid tribulation. The cross will pursue us wherever we go. –Abbot Vital Lehodey.
Such also is the thought of St Teresa. In her ‘Interior Castle’ she teaches that “all our desires, all our meditations, all our tears, all the efforts we can make (in order to raise ourselves to supernatural quietude), are useless; God alone gives this heavenly water to whom He pleases; often He gives it just when we least think of it.” However, she requires as an indispensable disposition “humility, humility, since it is by this virtue that Our Lord allows Himself to be overcome, and is induced to grant all our desires…Let a soul be humble and detached from everything, in very truth, however, and not merely in imagination which often deceives, and the Divine Master, I have no doubt, will grant her not only this grace, but even many others surpassing all her desires.” –Abbot Vital Lehodey
There can be no greater or livelier faith than to believe that God is managing our affairs with admirable wisdom and love when he seems to be destroying and annihilating us, when he frustrates our holiest designs, when he exposes us to calumny, obscures all our lights in prayer, dries up our devotion and fervor with aridities, ruins our health with infirmities and languors, reduces us to incapacity for doing anything at all. –Abbot Vital Lehody
Does He aim at detaching a soul from earthly things and uniting her strongly to Himself? He will deluge her with light and love. Plunged in God, of whose presence and action she is delightfully conscious, inflamed with the holy ardors of unitive love, fascinated by the divine beauty and goodness and by the tenderness of a Lord so great and holy for His miserable creature, she becomes instantly silent and contemplates Him in a hush of admiration. She envelopes her Well-Beloved with a long, lingering look wherein jostle each other the emotions of astonishment, joy, and love, which hold her captive. She enjoys her God in a union full of peace and sweetness, like St John reposing on the bosom of His beloved Master. –Abbot Vital Lehodey
I like the use of the female pronoun in the above quote. Embracing manliness, masculinity to a brutish nature, the passivity necessary for the proper reception of God calls for a female receptivity, a complete penetrating of self. In the world, I am a strong man. Before God, I find it more appropriate to think of myself as a weak impoverished bride–a King marrying a wretched peasant child.
Spiritual obscurity can be of many kinds. We are endeavoring to see things clearly when the light fails us, either in what regards our own interior life or the conduct of our neighbor. With God’s permission we find ourselves surrounded with darkness. Whatever be its nature or the degree of its density, it can never rob us of the lights of reason and faith….. –Abbot Vital Lehodey
As a true Savior, as a Physician as firm as He is wise and discreet, He applies the fire and the iron now to this place, now to that, but particularly there where His practiced eye sees faults to be expiated, defects to be corrected or a weak point to be strengthened. In spite of the protests of nature, He will continue the treatment with a merciful severity, so long as He judges it necessary to complete our cure and to dispose us for the reception of His gifts…God wills to temper and to tame it (self-will)….There can be no greater or livelier faith than to believe that God is managing our affairs with admirable wisdom and love when He seems to be destroying and annihilating us, when He frustrates our holiest designs, when He exposes us to calumny, obscures all our lights in prayer, dries up our devotion and fervor with aridities, ruins our health with infirmities and languors, reduces us to incapacity for doing anything at all. –Abbot Vital Lehodey.
WE want to save our souls and to tend to the perfection of the spiritual life. That is to say, we want to purify ourselves thoroughly, to make progress in all the virtues, to attain to loving union with God, and so in a sense to transform ourselves into Him ever more and more. This is the sole occupation to which we have exclusively consecrated our lives. It is a work of incomparable grandeur, yet also one that involves almost endless toil. It offers us liberty of spirit, peace and joy of heart, and the sweet unction of the Holy Ghost; but, on the other hand, it demands of us sacrifices innumerable and the patient labour of a lifetime. An undertaking so colossal would assuredly be not only difficult but utterly impossible to us, were we left dependent upon our own resources, for it belongs to the purely supernatural order. But “I can do all things in Him Who strengtheneth me ” (Phil. iv, 13). Without God, we are absolutely powerless, unable to do anything at all meritorious of eternal life; as St. Paul says: we cannot of ourselves even think or will what is good, much less bring it to accomplishment (2 Cor. iii, 5; Phil. ii, 13). –Abbot Vital Lehodey.
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