"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from
helping me, and from the words of my roaring?"
(Ps. 22:1)
Often sadness comes because, seeking God, we do not feel his presence
enough to satisfy ourselves. To want to feel it is not to want to
possess it, but
it is to want to assure ourselves, for love of ourselves, that we do
possess it, in order to console ourselves. Nature beaten and
discouraged is impatient
at guiding itself in a state of pure faith. It makes all its efforts
to get out of it because there all support is lacking. It is as
though up in the air.
It would like to feel its advancement. At the sight of its faults,
pride is offended, and it takes this hurt pride for a feeling of
penitence. We should
like, because of love of self, to have the pleasure of seeing
ourselves perfect. We scold ourselves for not being so. We are
impatient, haughty and in
an ill humor against ourselves and against others. Deplorable error!
As if the work of God could be accomplished by our chagrin! As if we
could unite ourselves
to the God of peace by losing the peace within! "Martha, Martha, why
art thou troubled about so many things," for the service of Jesus
Christ? "One thing
only is needful," which is to love him and to keep ourselves
motionless at his feet.
When we are really abandoned to God, all that we do we do well,
without doing many things. We abandon ourselves with confidence to
the future. We want with
no reservations all that God wants, and we close our eyes in order
not to anticipate the future. Meanwhile we devote ourselves in the
present to accomplishing
his will. Sufficient to each day is its good and its evil. This daily
accomplishment of the will of God is the coming of his kingdom within
us, and at
the same time our daily bread. We should be unfaithful, and guilty of
a pagan distrust, if we wished to penetrate into the future time
which God hides
from us. We leave it to him. It is for him to make it sweet or
bitter, short or long. Let him do what is good in his eyes. The most
perfect preparation
for this future, whatever it is, is to die to all will of our own, in
order to yield ourselves wholly to that of God. As the manna had all
flavours, this
general disposition encloses all the graces and all the feelings
suitable to every state in which God can successively place us.
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