Now, very often what prevents God’s grace from acting in depth in our lives, and is therefore a kind of sin, is the failure to accept ourselves as we are: our past, our mistakes, our physique, what we are on the human level, our psychological make-up, our weaknesses, and all the rest.

It isn’t easy. I do a lot of listening and spiritual accompanying, and I have heard hundreds of people say, “Father, I just can’t accept myself, I can’t bear the way I am.” Often I have even heard: “I hate myself!”

This is the opposite of humility, of spiritual childhood. Being a child means accepting ourselves as we are. We know we have plenty of limitations and imperfections, but we don’t make a production of it and we don’t turn it into a major problem. First, we know that God loves us as we are. He doesn’t love us for our achievements and successes, but because He has chosen to adopt us, each of us, as his children, and that’s that.  —Father Jacques Philippe ‘The Way of Trust and Love: A Retreat Guided by St. Therese of Lisieux

Conversely, in one of her letters Therese says that what hurts God most, our most serious failings in this regard, is our lack of trust. “What offends Jesus. What wounds His heart, is lack of trust.” God does not first expect of us that we be absolutely perfect (that will come little by little) but that we give him our trust. This is a remnant left of original sin: man distrusts God, is scared of God, runs away from God instead of trusting him completely.

Therese fully understood how trust draws God’s grace down on our lives. If we have an attitude of trust, we can be certain we are open to God’s love. We also need the good will I spoke of earlier, as well as humility, of course, but trust has a special power. Therese loved this quotation from St John of the Cross: “One obtains from God as much as one hopes for.” “Be it done for you as you have believed,” Jesus says in the Gospel.

–Father Jacques Phillippe “The Way of Trust and Love: A Retreat Guided by St Therese of Lisieux”

The Gospel path is just the opposite. It leads us to receive everything from God: the meaning of our lives, the courage we need, the light by which we make our choices. It leads us to recieve everything from God in trust, prayer and simplicity. That is one aspect of what Therese means by “staying little”: consenting to recieve everything necessary from God’s hand, day by day, without worrying about either the past or the future. Day by day, we do what is asked of us, without anxiety, without fear, certain that God is faithful and will give us what we need from moment to moment; never falling prey to the illusion that one day we will be able to manage without God.

Therese continued: “So I have always stayed little, having no other occupation than that of picking flowers, the flowers of love and sacrifice, and offering to god for his pleasure.”

This means: I don’t aim at extraordinary feats or grandiose deeds that everyone would admire. In the banality of my daily life, I seek to please God in little things, alert for every opportunity of showing simple signs of love, offering myself, etc–not to accumulate merits or rise above other people, but for love, to please God, as a child seeks to please her father.

–Father Jacques Phillippe “The Way of Trust and Love”

If we tried to live like that and deepen our relationship with God in our prayer life, so that we can perceive his presence within us and live as much as possible in communion with his indwelling, we shall discover something wonderful: the interior rhythm of grace that our life follows at its deepest level.

It might be said that there are two modes of time: time of the head and time of the heart. The first is psychological time, the time in our minds, which we make calculations about, and divided into hours and days to be managed in planned. This kind of time always goes either too fast or too slowly.

But there is another sort of time, experienced at certain moments of happiness or grace, though it always exists. This is God’s time, the time of the deep rhythms of grace in our lives. It is composed of a succession of moments harmoniously linked. Each of those moments is complete in itself, full, because in it we do what we have to do, in communion with God’s will. That time is communion with eternity. It is time we receive as a gift.

If we always lived in that time, we would have much less opportunity for harm and wrongdoing. The devil slips into time we live badly because we are refusing something or grasping too eagerly at something else.

The saints habitually lived in that interior time. To do that required great inner freedom, total detachment from our own plans and programs and inclinations. We must be ready to do in an instant just what we hadn’t expected, to live in total self-abandonment, with no other concern than doing God’s will and being fully available to people and events. We also need to experience in prayer God’s presence within us and to listen inwardly to the Holy Spirit so as to follow his suggestions.

There is nothing left to chance. Often we may journey in darkness, but we sense that our lives are unfolding in a rhythm we do not control but to which we are happy to abandon ourselves and by which all events are arranged with infinite wisdom. –Father Jacques Philippe ‘Interior Freedom’

Father Jacques Philippe ‘Interior Freedom’

… for purification. If we were always sure we were doing God’s Will and walking in the truth, we would soon become dangerously presumptuous and at risk of spiritual pride. Not always being absolutely sure we are doing God’s will is humbling and painful, but it protects us. It preserves us in an attitude of constant seeking and prevents the sort of false security that would dispense us from abandoning ourselves to God.

When uncertain about God’s will, it is very important that we tell ourselves: “Even if there are aspects of God’s will that escape me, there are always others that I know for sure and can invest in without any risk, knowing that this investment always pays dividends”…. a defect…needs to be recognized and avoided: finding ourselves in darkness about God’s will on an important question–a large scale vocational choice or some other serious decision–we spend so much time searching and doubting or getting discouraged, that we neglect things that are God’s will for us every day, like being faithful to prayer, maintaining trust in God, loving the people around us here and now (avoiding sin, recognizing afflictions). Lacking answers about the future, we should prepare to receive them by living today to the full.

We urgently need the meditation of another’s eyes to love ourselves and accept ourselves. The eyes may be those of a parent, a friend, a spiritual director; but above all they are those of God our Father. The look in his eyes is the purest, truest, tenderest, most loving, and most hope-filled in this world. The greatest gift given those who seek God’s face by persevering in prayer may be that one day they will perceive something of this divine look upon themselves; they will feel themselves loved so tenderly that they will receive the grace of accepting themselves in depth.

What has just been said has an important consequence. When people cut themselves off from God, they deprive themselves of any real possibility of loving themselves. This also works the other way: people who hate themselves cut themselves off from God. In ‘Dialogues of the Carmelites’ by Georges Bernanos, the aged prioress addresses the following words to the young Blanche de la Force: “Above all, never despise yourself. It is difficult to despise ourselves without offending God in us.”

To finish with, here is a short passage from Henri Nouwen’s beautiful book ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’:

For a very long time I considered low self-esteem to be some kind of virtue. I had been warned so often against pride and conceit that I came to consider it a good thing to deprecate myself. But now I realize that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.” –Father Jacques Philippe “Interior Freedom”

The most important and fruitful acts of our freedom are not those by which we transform the outside world as those by which we change our inner attitude in light of the faith that God can bring good out of everything without exception. Even when externally there is nothing to be done, we still have inner freedom to continue to love. –Father Jacques Philippe ‘Interior Freedom’

The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom
And the possibilities it seems to offer
It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it

Lyrics from a 70s rock song that stuck in my mind

God is eternally present, eternally young, is eternal and new, and our past and future are his. He can forgive everything, purify everything, renew everything. In the present moment, because of his infinitely merciful love, we always have the possibility of starting again, not impeded by the past or tormented by the future.Living in the present permits our hearts to expand. The effort to live in the reality and in each moment is of the greatest importance in times of suffering. St. Therese of Lisieux said during her illness, “I only suffer for one moment. It is because people think about the past and the future that they become discouraged and despair.” We can always have the grace to bear today the suffering that is ours now. –Father Jacques Philippe ‘Interior Freedom’