Part one (7): Xix Practice of Christian Humility

Xix Practice of Christian Humility

Since, as has been said, Christian humility is so important and so necessary, you must seek out every means to give yourself a solid foundation in this virtue.

For this purpose, I repeat my advice that you frequently read and reread, consider and intently ponder the truths I have set forth relating to humility of mind and of heart, as well as those which I am about to set down here. I urge you to pray to Our Lord to impress them upon your mind, and make you ever carry with you, in heart and soul, the sentiments and effects proceeding from them. It is not enough for you to know superficially and vaguely that you are nothing, that you are powerless to do good or avoid evil, that all good is from on high, from the Father of lights, and that every good work comes to you from God through His Son. You must also become firmly rooted in a profound realization of your imprisonment under the law of sin, of your uselessness, incapacity and unworthiness in God's service, of your deficiency in all good things, of your nothingness, your extreme poverty and urgent need of Jesus Christ and of His grace.

This ought to make you cry out unceasingly to your liberator, and at all times fly to His grace, never relying upon anything except His omnipotent and infinite goodness.

God sometimes permits you to work for a long time to conquer a passion and become established in a virtue, and to advance very slowly towards your goal, so that the experience may teach you what you are, and how little you can do of yourself, thus obliging you to seek outside yourself, in Jesus Christ our Lord, the power to serve God. God did not will to give His Son to mankind until the world had longed for Him for four thousand years, and had learned by the experience of two thousand years that it was incapable of keeping the Law, and freeing itself from sin, and that it needed a new spirit and a new power to resist evil and do good. By this He showed you that He wants you to recognize your wretchedness very clearly before He gives you His grace.

This truth should lead you to recognize once every day, before God, your wretchedness as it is in His eyes, and to renounce Adam and yourself, since Adam and you yourself have sinned and surrendered your nature to the devil. Renounce yourself, then, altogether. Renounce your own judgment and every power and ability you may be conscious of in yourself. For all the power left by Adam. in human

nature is powerless, and any sense of power you may have is mere illusion, presumption and a mistaken estimate. Nor will you ever have any real power or perfect freedom to do good, except by renouncing yourself, and emerging from- yourself and all that belongs to you, in order to live in the spirit and virtue of Jesus Christ.

Following this renunciation, adore Christ Jesus; give yourself entirely to Him, and ask Him to take over Adam's rights as well as your own, since by His Precious Blood and death He acquired the rights of all sinners. Beg Him to dwell in you to dispossess your nature, to ,appropriate and make free use of all that you are in His hands, and protest to Him that you desire to depart from your own way of looking at things, which is a spirit of pride and vanity, and from all your intentions, tendencies and dispositions, so that you may no longer live save in His spirit, His divine and adorable dispositions.

Implore Him by His great mercy to draw you out of yourself as from a hell and to establish you i n Himself, in His spirit of humility. Ask this favor not for your benefit or satisfaction, but for His pleasure, and His glory, pure and simple. And again, pray that He may make use of His divine power to destroy your pride, and that He may no 'longer wait upon your weakness to establish His glory in you by means of perfect humility. Remember that, of yourself as a sinner you are, as has been said, a potential demon, a Lucifer and an antichrist, because of the sin, the pride and self-love which always remain in each one of us. Frequently, and especially at the beginning of the day, place yourself at the feet of Jesus and of His holy Mother, and say to them.

"0 Jesus, 0 Mother of Jesus, keep this wretched demon well under foot, crush this snake, exterminate this antichrist with Your precious breath; bind this Lucifer, that he may do nothing today against Your holy glory.

Now I do not intend that you should, every day, repeat before God all these prayers in the exact form in which I have set them down, but in whatever way it shall please Our Lord to make them appeal to you.

When you make resolutions to be humble, do so by giving yourself to the Son of God, that He may fulfil your desires, and say to Him:

I give myself to Thee, my Lord Jesus, that I may enter into Thy spirit of humility. I wish to spend all the days of my life with Thee, in this holy virtue. I call down upon myself the power of Thy spirit of humility in order to annihilate my pride and bind me close to Thee in humility. I offer up to Thee all the opportunities for humility that shall present themselves in my life. Deign, I beseech Thee, to bless them. I renounce myself and all things which may prevent me from sharing in the grace of Thy humility!' But after this do not place your confidence in your own resolutions, nor in this practice, but rely solely upon the bounty of our Lord Jesus Christ.

You can follow a similar course with each of the other virtues or pious intentions you wish to present to God. In this way, they will be based not on you yourself, but on our Lord Jesus Christ and on the grace and mercy of God which are upon you.

When you present to God your desires and intentions to serve Him, it should be with a profound belief that you can neither fulfil these, nor deserve to do so yourself. If God treated you as you deserved, He would not even suffer you to think of such resolves, and it is because of His very goodness and because of the merits of the Precious Blood of His Son that He tolerates you in His presence, and allows you to hope for the grace to serve Him.

You must not be surprised when you fail in your good resolutions. We are all sinners, and God is not obliged to give us His grace. "I know," says St. Paul, "that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in m y flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present to me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not" (Rom. 7, 18).

So great is our weakness that it is not sufficient for God to inspire us with a good thought; it is also necessary for Him to grant us the will and resolve to put it into effect. Nothing will come of a good resolution if God does not grant the grace to accomplish and perfect the act. Finally each one of us needs also the special grace to persevere until the end of his life.

You ought, therefore, to submit yourself to God in your search for virtue. You should desire His grace and ask Him for it, but you should be surprised when He grants it. When you fall, you should

adore His judgment of you, yet not become discouraged, but rather humble yourself and constantly persevere in giving yourself to Him, that you may enter with more virtue into His grace. You should live constantly in great gratitude and thanksgiving towards Him, because He t&lerates you in His presence and inspires you with the desire to serve Him. And even though, after much effort on your part, God should give you no more than one good thought, you should recognize that you do not deserve even this one, and prize i t so highly that you should consider it well worth all your trouble. If, after a thousand years of hell, the damned could form even one good thought of God, they would consider it much honor and great gain, and the devil is ever in a rage because he knows that he will never have a holy thought, for he looks upon goodness as a perfection which his pride desires, yet beholds himself deprived of it by the curse that is upon him. We, like the demons, are sinners and the only thing that sets us apart from them is the mercy of God, a mercy which should lead us to value His gifts and be satisfied with them. For, however little they may be, they are always more than we deserve. Enter, then, reflectively and deeply into this spirit of humble admission of your unworthiness, and by so doing you will draw down upon your soul a thousand blessings from God and He will be greatly glorified in you.

When God has granted you some favor, either for yourself or for someone dear to you, do not ascribe this to the power of your prayers but to His mercy alone.

If in the good works God gives you the grace to accomplish, you feel any complacency or spirit of gratification, humble yourself, remember that all good comes to you from God alone, and that, from yourself nothing can come but evil. Bear in mind that you have much stronger reasons for being afraid and humbling yourself in view of th.e many faults and imperfections with which you perform your actions, than for puffing yourself up and feeling pleased when you see the slight good you are doing, a good, moreover, that does not proceed from you.

If men censure and sneer at you, accept it as being fully deserved, in honor of the contempt and calumnies suffered by the Son of God. If you are accorded any honor or receive thanks, refer all such praises

to God, and see that you do not appropriate them to yourself, nor rest on your laurels, because these may prove to be the only reward of your good actions. You may thus come to feel the effect of these words of the Son Of God: "Woe to you when men shall bless you: for according to these things did their fathers to the false prophets" (Luke 6, 26). These words teach you to consider and fear the praise and applause of the world not only as mere wind and smoke and illusion, but also as a danger and a curse.

Perform with a ready will lowly and menial acts that involve abjection, so as to mortify your pride. But see that you act in a spirit of humility, with inward sentiments and dispositions corresponding to the things done.

At the beginning of everything you do, always humble yourself before God, remembering that you are not worthy to exist or to do anything, and that you have no power to please Him, unless He gives you grace for that purpose.

In a word, engrave deep in your heart these words of the Holy Ghost, and systematically put them into practice: Humiliate in omnibus, et coram Deo invenies gratiam, quontam magna potentia Del' solius, et ab humilibus honoratur. "Humble thyself in all things, and thou shalt find grace before God: for great is the power of God alone. and he is honored by the humble" (Eccli. 3, 20-21).

Xx. Confidence and Self-abandonment in the Hands of God

Humility is the mother of confidence. When you realize that you are destitute of all good and of every virtue, and of all power and capacity to serve God, and that you are a true hell full of all kinds of evil, you can no longer rely in any way upon yourself, or upon what is yours. You are obliged to emerge from yourself, as you would go out of hell, to enter into Jesus as Into Paradise, where you find in great abundance all that is lacking in yourself. You must place your reliance and trust in Him, as in the One given to you by your Eternal Father to be your redemption, your justice, your virtue, your sanctification, your treasure, your strength, your life and your all. It is to this that He would draw you when He lovingly and compellingly urges you to come to Him with confidence, saying: "Come to me, all you

who labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh you" (Matt. 11, 28), and will relieve you of the weight of your sorrows. Our Lord assures us that He will reject no one who will come to Him: Eum qui Venit ad me non eiiciam foras (John 6, 37).

In order to compel us to become confident, He tells us in various texts of Holy Scripture (1) that accursed and wretched are they who place their trust in any other thing but Him; but happy and blessed are they who entrust themselves to Him (Jer. 17, 5-7); they shall abound in all kinds of graces and blessings, and shall lack nothing (PS. 22, 1-2). His eyes are fixed upon those who hope in I-Es mercy (Ps. 32, 1 8 ) . He is good to those who, hope in Him (Lam. 3, 25). His mercy shall compass them about (Ps. 31, io) and He Himself will always be by their side (Prov. 3, 26). He is the shield of all that trust in Him (II Kings, 2 2 , 31); He is their protector and helper (Ps. 113, 11). He will protect them in His tabernacle and He will hide them in the secret of His face, or, as another version has it, "in the apple of his eye" (PS. 30, 21). He will be their defense in the day of trial, and will help them and deliver them from the hands of sinners because they have put their trust in Him (Ps. 90, 14-15); He will let them taste in its perfection the great multitude of His sweetness (PS. 30, 20); they will always be full of joy, and He will abide in them (Ps. 5, 12). He lavishes upon them His graces and the effects of His mercy, in proportion to the hope and confidence they have in Him (Ps. 32, 22); those who trust in Him will know truth (Wis. 3, 9), that is, He the Sovereign Truth will manifest Himself to those who trust in Him; they will not sin, or, according to the Hebrew version, they will not be condemned and will not perish, that is, He will not allow them to fall into sins that would separate them from Him and reduce them to perdition (PS. 33, 23); those who place their hope in Him will sanctify themselves as He is sanctified (I John 3, 3). Never has anyone who entrusted himself to Him been disappointed or defrauded of his expectations (Eccli. 2, 11). God grants to them everything that they confidently ask of Him (Matt. 21, 22). Finally, nothing is im (1). St. John Eudes weaves into this passage several scriptural texts on confidence. We have not attempted to quote the exact words from the Douay version but have merely inserted the biblical references. (Editors' note-English translation.)

possible to those who have faith and confidence in Him, but they can accomplish all things, relying on His goodness and power (Mark 9, 22).

I could go on for ever, if I began to quote here all the texts from Holy Scripture in which God commends to you the virtue Of trust. It seems as if He were not satisfied even with the thousand instances i n Holy Scripture by which He proves how dear and delightful this holy virtue is to Him, and how much He loves and favors those who place their trust in His goodness and abandon themselves entirely to the fatherly care of His Divine Providence.

You may read in the third book of Intimations of Divine Piety, by St. Gertrude, that Jesus once told her that the filial confidence of a Christian soul is the eye of the holy spouse, of which the Divine Bridegroom says in the Canticle of Canticles: Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa: vulnerasti cor meum in uno oculorum tuorum. "Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse: thou hast wounded m y heart by one of thine eyes" (Cant. 4, g). In other words, the soul that has firm confidence in Christ, and trusts that He can and desires to help it faithfully in all things, pierces His heart right through with an arrow of love; and such confidence does such violence to the piety of Jesus that He can in no way absent Himself from it.

St. Mechtilde's Book of Special Grace tells us that Jesus said to her also: "It is a special delight to Me when men trust in My goodness and rely upon Me. And so, whoever shall have great trust in Me, yet always with humility, shall be favored by Me in this life, and in the next receive more than he deserves. The more anyone trusts in Me and avails himself of My goodness, the greater will be his gain, since it is impossible for a man not to obtain what he believes with holy conviction, and hopes to gain because it has been promised him. And so it is most advantageous to a man to have firm trust in Me, when he hopes for great things from Me!' And again, when St. Mechtilde asked God what was the main thing she should believe of His ineffable goodness, He replied: "Firmly believe that after death I will receive you as a father receives a dear son, and that no father ever so faithfully and lovingly gave all his possessions to an only son, as I will make you a sharer in all that is Mine. Whoever shall believe this

of My goodness, firmly and with humble charity, will be happy indeed."