Live 4 The LORD

How God Calls Us

God intervenes by creating an emptiness, an interior desert, around the chosen soul whom he wants to lead into a more intense communion with himself. 

This is very easily brought about through events of life that are more or less common to all: sorrows, separations, failures, lack of understanding, illnesses, to which God adds an apparent but agonizing abandonment on his part.

In this way we are gradually stripped of all sense of self-sufficiency and acquire a deep humility. Yet although God acts hiddenly, he does not fail to support us with his grace, since these painful purifying trials are not for death, but for life. 

And when a person “is brought to nothing, the highest degree of humility, the spiritual union between the soul and God will be effected”

My God every thing here on earth is mean and cold and arid! I no longer want or expect anything from creatures; I do not even look forward to finding a sure life or future in them. . . 

But must I be satisfied with this, my God? No, the emptiness that created beings leave has to be filled. With what? With myself, perhaps? What foolishness! . . . 

O infinite, uncreated Love, O my Life, help me to rise up toward you! . . .By myself l am incapable of that. My part is only to pray, and to wait in humble, steadfast confidence. 

Then, in your merciful goodness, you will make me live in you according to your adorable purposes, neither more nor less, simply because it pleases you, and not for any advantages that might come to me.

You created us to live, O God, but to live for you, and not for material things nor for ourselves.

“For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God”. . . What does this mean but that the soul that aspires to dwell with God in the impregnable fortress of holy recollection must be separated, detached, and withdrawn spiritually from the thought of all else? . . . I die daily. 

I diminish and renounce self more every day, so that you can increase and be exalted in me, O Christ. I remain in the deepest depths of my poverty. I see my nothingness, my misery, my helplessness. I acknowledge my utter inability to make any progress or to persevere. . . . In my misery I prostrate myself and, openly acknowledging it, I lay it before your mercy, O my beloved Master. . . . 

I place the joy of my soul—a spiritual, not an emotional joy—in all that immolates, destroys, and humbles me, for I want to make room for you. . . . I wish no longer to live my own life, but to be transformed in you, so that my life may be divine rather than human, and so that the Father, overshadowing me, may recognize the image of his “beloved Son in whom he is well pleased.”