Thursday, August 5, 2010

unity of means

Francois Mauriac said "Purify the source" and this passage seems to tell HOW you might go about doing that.

The interior life is the life and sway of the love of Jesus within the soul.  It is Jesus owning and ruling all its faculties, filling them with hiss grace and virrtue, pouring himself forth upon them and drawing them within himself, that they may dwell there as in a center or peace and rest.

To attain this life, which is the object of all exterior practices and devotions, you must first of all bring about unity in the means.

For a certain period, nourish your mind, heart, piety and virtue solely on the love of Jesus, that this divine thought may become second nature within you, habitual, easy and lovable.

To train yourself to think of and to feel the love of Jesus, read and meditate on nothing but divine love, until this constant nourishment has developed a spirit or mentality within your soul.  Acts of virtue should begin by acts of reason.  The heart will follow its light very quickly, and will be won to divine sweetness and goodness, when they are revealed to it in their lovable truth.  Before God can be loved, he must be known.   God manifests himself to man in light.  One grace of light is worth more than a thousand graces and sweetness and consolation.  Feelings pass, but convictions remain.

The devil wages war especially on graces of light, by means of the distractions and bondage of temporal affairs or of worldly amusements.

The devil can do nothing to a soul rapt in God.  To recollect oneself is to gather oneself up from things without to things within.   It is to live around God, with God.  A soul is strong and makes progress in virtue only in so far as it is recollected.   Indeed recollection is the just and inexorable balancing of its profit and loss, its virtues and its defects.

Saint Peter Julian Eymard
His feast day was actually August 2. 

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