A Reading From Jean-Pierre de Caussade S.J.

This was the Day by Day Reading for Sunday the 14th in the August Magnificat:
"Shall I never succeed with the help of grace in instilling into you mind and still more into your heart this great principle of faith, so sweet, so consoling, so loving, and so pacifying? We ought often to pray: My God, may all Your most holy intentions be accomplished in me and never my own; may they be accomplished because while infinitely just in themselves they are also infinitely advantageous for me. I know that You can will only the greatest good of Your creatures so long as they remain submissive to Your orders. May my own will never be accomplished except when it is in perfect agreement with Yours because otherwise it can only be harmful to me. If ever, my God, it should happen through ignorance or passion that I persist in desires contrary to Yours, may I be disappointed and punished, not by Your justice, but by Your pity and great mercy.
Come what may, as Saint Francis de Sales used to say, Long live Jesus! I shall take sides with Divine Providence even if human wisdom tear out her hair with rage. When one is illuminated by heavenly light, one thinks very differently from most men, but what a source of peace, what power one finds in this way of thinking and looking at things! How happy are the saints, how peacefully they live, and what miserable blind fools we are not to be willing to train ourselves to think as they do, preferring to be entombed in the thick darkness of this accursed human wisdom which makes us so wretched, blind, and guilty. Let us study how to give all our care and attention to the task of conforming ourselves in all things to the holy will of God in spite of interior revolt. That revolt itself must be accepted in obedience to the will of God which permits it in order to accustom us to remain at all times and in all circumstances before Him in a state of sacrifice by even an interior silence of respect, adoration, self-annihilation, submission and love, and with a self-abandonment full of confidence.
-Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J.