Continued The Soul of The Apostolate

Elizabeth of the Trinity, like Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, will be on hold until the books I am borrowing come in the post. But, I still want to share ideas from The Soul of the Apostolate, and, as everything is connected, this is good.

“Outside of Christ,” says St. Jerome, in his turn, “I am powerlessness itself.” The Seraphic Doctor, in the fourth book of his Compendium Theologiae, enumerates the five chief characteristics which the power of Christ takes on in us. The first is that it undertakes difficult things and confronts obstacles with courage: “Have courage and let your heart be strong.” 29 The second is contempt for the things of this earth: “I have suffered the loss of all things and counted them but as dung that I may gain Christ.” 30 The third is patience under trial: “Love is strong as death.” 31 The fourth is resistance to temptation: “As a roaring lion he goeth about . . . whom resist ye, strong in faith.” s” The fifth is interior martydrom, that is, the testimony not of blood but of one’s very life, crying out to Christ: “I want to belong to Thee alone.” It consists in fighting the concupiscences, in overcoming vice and in working manfully for the acquisition of virtues: “I have fought a good fight.”  

While the exterior man counts on his own natural powers, the man of interior life, on the other hand, sees them as nothing but helps; useful helps, no doubt, but far from being everything that he needs. The sense of his weakness and his faith in the power of God give him, as they did to St. Paul, the exact limit of his strength. When he sees the obstacles that rise up one after another before him, he cries out in humble pride: “When I am weak, then am I powerful”  

“Without interior life,” says Pius X, “we will never have strength to persevere in sustaining all the difficulties inseparable from any apostolate, the coldness and lack of cooperation even on the part of virtuous men, the calumnies of our adversaries, and at times even the jealousy of friends and comrades in arms . . . Only a patient virtue, unshakably based upon the good, and at the same time smooth and tactful, is able to move these difficulties to one side and diminish their power.” “ By the life of prayer, comparable to the sap flowing from the vine into the branches, the divine power comes down upon the apostle to strengthen the understanding by giving it a firmer footing in faith. The apostle makes progress because this virtue lights his path with its clear brilliance. He goes forward with resolution because he knows where he wants to go, and how to arrive at his goal. 

The Illuminative State becomes a reality.

This enlightenment is accompanied by such great supernatural energy in the will that even a weak and vacillating character becomes capable of heroic acts. Thus it is that the principle, “abide in Me,”in union with the Immutable, with Him who is the Lion of Juda and the Bread of the strong, explains the miracle of invincible constancy and perfect firmness, which were united, in so marvelous an apostle as was St. Francis de Sales, with a humility and tact beyond compare. The mind and the will are strengthened by the interior life, because love is strengthened. Christ purifies our love and directs and increases it as we go on. He allows us to share in the movements of compassion, devotion, abnegation, and selflessness of His adorable Heart. If this love increases until it becomes a passion, then Jesus takes all the natural and supernatural powers of man, and exalts them to the limit, and uses them for Himself. Thus it is easy to judge what an increase of merit will flow from the multiplication of energies given by the interior life, when one remembers that merit depends less upon the difficulty that may be entailed by an action, than upon the intensity of charity with which it is carried out. 

It Gives Him Joy and Consolation only a burning and unchangeable love is capable of filling a whole life with sunlight, for it is love that possesses the secret of gladdening the heart even in the midst of great sorrows and crushing fatigue. The life of an apostolic worker is a tissue of sufferings and hard work. What hours of sadness, anxiety, and gloom await the apostle who has not the conviction that he is loved by Christ — no matter how buoyant his character may be — unless perhaps the demon fowlers make the mirror of human consolations and of apparent success glitter before this simple bird, to draw him into their inextricable nets. Only the man-God can draw from a soul this superhuman cry: “I exceedingly abound with joy in all our tribulation.”  In the midst of my inmost trials, the Apostle is saying, the summit of my being, like that of Jesus at Gethsemane, tastes a joy that, though it has nothing sensible about it, is so real that, in spite of the agony suffered by my interior self, 1 would not exchange it for all the joys of the world. 

When trials come, or contradiction, humiliation, suffering, the loss of possessions, even the loss of those we love, the soul will accept all these crosses in a far different manner than would have been the case at the beginning of his conversion. 

From day to day he grows in charity. His love has nothing spectacular about it, perhaps; the Master may give him the treatment accorded to strong souls and lead him through the ways of an ever more and more profound annihilation or by the path of expiation for himself and for the world. It matters little. Protected by his recollection, nourished by the Holy Eucharist, his love grows without ceasing, and the proof of this growth is to be found in the generosity with which he sacrifices and abandons himself; in the devotedness which urges him to press forward, careless of the difficulty, to find those souls upon whom he is to exercise his apostolate with such patience, prudence, tact, compassion, and ardor as can only be explained by the penetration of the life of Christ in him. Vivit vero in me Cbristus. The Sacrament of love must be the Sacrament of Joy. There is no interior soul that is not in the same time a Eucharistic soul, and consequently, one who enjoys inwardly the gift of God, delights in His presence, and tastes the sweetness of the Beloved possessed within the soul and there adored.

The life of the apostolic man is a life of prayer. And the Saint of Ars says: “The life of prayer is the one big happiness on this earth. O marvelous life! The wonder of the union of a soul with God! Eternity will not be long enough to understand this happiness …. The interior life is a bath of love, into which the soul may plunge entirely…. And there the soul is, as it were, drowned in love. . . . God holds the interior soul the way a mother holds her baby’s head in her hand, to cover him with kisses and caresses.” Further, our joy is nourished when we contribute to cause the object of our love to be served and honored. The apostle will know all these joys. Using active works to increase his love, he feels, at the same time, an increase of joy and consolation. A “hunter of souls” — venator animarum — he has the joy of contributing to the salvation of beings that would have been damned, and thus he has the joy of consoling God by giving His souls from whom He would have been separated for eternity. 

Zeal for souls is a real sign of the Illuminative State. One sees constantly with the Mind of Christ.

And finally he has the joy of knowing that he thus obtains for himself one of the firmest guarantees of progress in virtue and of eternal glory. 

Refines His Purity of Intention The man of faith judges active works by quite a different light from the man who lives in outward things. What he looks at is not so much the outward appearance of things, as their place in the divine plan and their supernatural results. And so, considering himself as a simple instrument, his soul is all the more filled with horror at any self-satisfaction in his own endowments, because he places his sole hope of success in the conviction of his own helplessness and confidence in God alone. 

Thus he is confirmed in a state of abandonment. And as he passes through his various difficulties, how different is his attitude from that of the apostle who knows nothing of intimacy with Christ! Furthermore, this abandonment does not in the least diminish his zeal for action. He acts as though success depended entirely on his own activity, but in point of fact he expects it from God alone.38 He has no trouble subordinating all his projects and hopes to the unfathomable designs of a God who often uses failure even better than success to bring about the good of souls. 

Amen to that!

Consequently this soul will remain in a state of holy indifference with respect to success or failure. He is always ready to say: “O my God, Thou dost not will that the work I have begun should be completed. It pleases Thee that I confine myself acting valiantly, yet ever peacefully, to making efforts to achieve results, but that I leave to Thee alone the task of deciding whether Thou wilt receive more glory from my success, or from the act of virtue that failure will give me the opportunity to perform. Blessed a thousand times be Thy holy and adorable Will, and may I, with the help of Thy grace, know just as well how to repel the slightest symptoms of vain complacency, if Thou shouldst bless my work, as to humble myself and adore Thee if Thy Providence sees fit to wipe out everything that my labors have produced.”

Those who love the Bride of Christ, the Church both mourn and love her.

The heart of the apostle bleeds, in very truth, when he beholds the sufferings of the Church, but his manner of suffering has nothing in common with that of the man animated by no supernatural spirit. This is easily seen when we consider the behavior and the feverish activity of the latter as soon as difficulties arise, and when we look at his fits of impatience and of dejection, his despair sometimes, his complete collapse in the presence of ruins beyond repair. 

This next section could be called a description of a saint in action and in contemplation.

The genuine apostle makes use of everything, success as well as failure, to increase his hope and expand his soul in confident abandonment to Providence. There is not the slightest detail of his apostolate that does not serve as the occasion for an act of faith. There is not a moment of his persevering toil that does not give him a chance to prove his love, for by practicing custody of the heart he manages to do everything with more and more perfect purity of heart, and by his abandonment he makes his ministry day by day more selfless. Thus, every one of his acts takes on ever more and more of the character of sanctity, and his love of souls, which at the outset was mixed with many imperfections, gets purer and purer all the time; he ends up by only seeing these souls in Christ and loving them only in Christ, and thus, through Christ, he brings them forth to God. “My children, of whom I am in labor again, until Christ be formed in you.” 30 f. 


It Is a Firm Defense Against Discouragement --important for our times.

Bossuet has a sentence which is beyond the comprehension of an apostle who does not realize what must be the soul of his apostolate. It runs: “When God desires a work to be wholly from His hand, he reduces all to impotence and nothingness, and then He acts.” Nothing wounds God so much as pride. And yet when we go out for success, we can get to such a point, by our lack of purity of intention, that we set ourselves up as a sort of divinity, the principle and end of our own works. This idolatry is an abomination in the sight of God. And so when He sees that the activities of the apostle lack that selflessness which His glory demands from a creature, he sometimes leaves the field clear for secondary causes to go to work, and the building soon comes crashing down. The workman faces his task with all the fire of his nature — active, intelligent, loyal. Perhaps he realizes brilliant success. He even rejoices in them. He takes complacency in them. It is his work. All his! Vent, vidi, vici. He has just about appropriated this famous saying to himself. But wait a little. Something happens, with the permission of God; a direct attack by Satan or the world is inflicted upon the work or even the person of the apostle; result, total ruin. But far more tragic is the interior upheaval in this ex-champion — the product of his sorrow and discouragement. The greater was his joy, the more profound his present state of dejection. Only Our Lord is capable of raising up this wreck. “Get up,” He says to the discouraged apostle, “and instead of acting alone, take to your work again, but with Me, in Me, and by Me.” But the miserable man no longer hears this voice. He has become so lost in externals that it would take a real miracle of grace for him to hear it — a miracle upon which his repeated infidelities give him no right to count. Only a vague conviction of the Power of God and of His Providence hovers over the desolation of this benighted failure, and it is not enough to drive away the clouds of sadness which continue to envelop him. What a different sight is the real priest, whose ideal it is to reproduce Our Lord! For him, prayer and holiness of life remain the two chief ways of acting upon the Heart of God and on the hearts of men. Yes, he has spent himself, and generously too. But the mirage of success seemed to him to be something unworthy of the undivided attention of a real apostle. Let storms come if they will, the secondary cause that produced them is of no importance. In the midst of a heap of ruins, since he has worked only with Our Lord, he hears clearly in the depths of his heart the “Fear not” — noli timere — which gave back to the disciples, in the storm, their peace and confidence. He runs to renew his love of the Blessed Sacrament, his deep, personal devotion to the Sorrows of Our Lady; and that is the first result of the trial. His soul, instead of being crushed by failure, comes out of the wine

"They Have No Wine" More from Father Chautard

In my twenties, my late twenties to be exact, I was involved in three areas of lay work in the Church. As Pope Benedict told us not to use the term "ministries" for lay work, I shall be obedient and not use that word.

I had been working in the Church as a lay person very actively for about seven six years, when I experienced "burn out". I went to my superiors and asked for "time out", which led to the dropping of all my areas of work. However, those above me simply did not understand why I was burnt out.

I understood that God had made me for interior work, such as research, scholarship, prayer, but those in the community where I had lived for several years, were all action oriented and very extroverted, strong people.

They did not understand my need for silence and solitude. My interior life grew once I took a break, but I ended up leaving that community, as God showed me where my real work was to be--in the college classroom. Spiritual warfare did not end, but I had the strength to deal with it. This is a key idea--if we are in the vocation to which God has called us, we can withstand the evils we meet, if we turn to God in prayer.

We must not stop doing God's work, but we must, like my friend, like myself, realize that we are limited to the grace God gives us. To pretend to transcend grace is the serious sin of presumption. We are not all the same type of saint.

The key is our own personal relationship with Christ and how Christ wants to use us in the Kingdom. This is not pop psychology on "gifts" but the reality that we are made for work in the Kingdom according to God's plan.

I was and am reminded of the Gospel concerning the first miracle of Christ--the changing of the water into wine. This is what God wants of us--our watery selves, are common souls changed into Him, His Blood going through our souls, minds, imagination, wills, not ours.

But, the wine also symbolizes, besides the need for the Eucharist, the absolute necessity for prayer, meditation, contemplation, the examen.

This wine gives us all the ways to develop the virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. And, it is our duty to growth in these virtues, through prayer, purification, and mortification.

Ask Mary for grace to pray. Ask Mary for grace to repent and be purified. Ask Mary for help in all things physical and spiritual. She asked Christ to change water into wine, and she will change our weaknesses into strength for the Kingdom and for our own salvation.

Let me go back to The Soul of the Apostolate for a minute.

Let us consider six main features of the way the interior life filters into a soul to establish it in genuine virtue.

 a. It Protects the Soul Against the Dangers of the Exterior Ministry 

“It is more difficult to live well, when one has care of souls, on account of the dangers from without,” says St. Thomas.24 We have spoken of these dangers in the preceding chapter. While the active worker who has no interior spirit is unaware of the dangers arising from his work, and thus resembles an unarmed traveler passing through a forest infested with brigands, the genuine apostle, for his part, dreads them and each day he takes precautions against them by a serious examination of conscience which reveals to him his weak points. If the interior life did nothing more than procure for us the advantage of realizing our incessant danger, it would already be contributing very much to our protection against surprises along our way; for to foresee a danger is half the battle in avoiding it. And yet the inner life has an even greater utility than merely this. It becomes, for the man engaged in the ministry, a complete set of armor. “Put you on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil.” 25 It is a divine armor which permits him not only to resist the temptations and avoid the snares set before him by the devil (that you may be able to resist in the evil day), but also to sanctify his every act (and stand in all things perfect). It girds him with purity of intention, which concentrates all his thoughts, desires, and affections upon God and keeps him from going astray and seeking his own comfort, pleasures, and distractions: “having your loins girt about with truth.” It puts on him the breastplate of charity, which gives him a manly heart and defends him against the seductions of creatures and of the spirit of the world, as well as against the assaults of the demon: “having on the breastplate of justice.” He is shod with discretion and reserve in order that in all that he does he may know how to combine the simplicity of the dove and the prudence of the serpent: “And your feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace.” Satan and the world will try to deceive his intellect with the sophisms of false doctrine, and to sap his energies with the enticements of lax principles. But the interior life faces all these lies with the shield of faith, which keeps ever before our eyes the splendor of the divine ideal: “In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one.” The soul will find, in the knowledge of its own nothingness, in care for its own salvation, in the conviction that we can do absolutely nothing without grace, and consequently need at all times insistent, suppliant, and frequent prayer (all the more efficacious in proportion to its confidence) — in all this the soul will find a brazen helmet against which all the blows of pride are dulled: “take unto you the helmet of salvation.” Thus armed from head to foot, the apostle can give himself without fear to good works, and his zeal, enkindled by meditation on the Gospel and fortified by the Bread of the Eucharist, will become a sword that will serve him both in combat against the enemies of his own soul and in conquest of a host of souls for Christ: “the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.” 

b. It Renews the Strength of the Apostle 

Only a saint, as we have said, is able to keep intact the interior spirit and always direct all his thoughts and intentions to God alone, in the midst of a welter of occupations, and in habitual contact with the world. In such a one, every outlay of external activity is so supernaturalized and inflamed with charity that, far from diminishing his strength, it brings with it, necessarily, an increase of grace. In other people, even fervent souls, the supernatural life seems to suffer loss after more or less time spent in exterior occupations. Their less perfect hearts, too preoccupied with the good to be done to their neighbor, too absorbed with a compassion (for the woes to be alleviated) that is not nearly supernatural enough, seem to send up to God flames less pure, darkened with the smoke of numerous imperfections. God does not punish this weakness by a decrease of His grace, and does not demand a strict account of these failings, provided there is a serious attempt at vigilance and prayer in the midst of action, and that the soul is ready, when its work is done, to return to Him and rest and regain its strength. This habit of constantly beginning over again, which is necessitated by the combination of the active with the interior life, gives joy to His paternal Heart.

Remember the miracle of Moses regarding the punishment of God against the Egyptians by turning the Nile into blood? That was a sign of God's power to change ever nature for the sake of His People. Our own natures must be changed through repentance. This great sign which pointed to the power of God and the death of those who do not accept Him, (those who do not believe perish for turning against the Blood of Christ and will be called to explain why they did not listen to the Church's teaching on worthy Communion).

We see in God's punishment a warning to us all not to ignore the wine of prayer, of repentance, of metanoia, like Pharaoh and his people did. Blood was seen as "unclean" in Old Testament times, but Christ's Blood, He the true Anathemata, the reject one, killed outside the city limits of Jerusalem, like a scapegoat, as if He was an impure Sacrifice instead of the most pure, redeems us by His Blood. But, that same Christ will judge us severely for refusing His Sacrament of Life.

Besides, in those who really put up a fight, these imperfections become less and less serious and frequent in proportion as the soul learns to return, tirelessly, to Christ, whom we will always find ready to say to us: “Come back to Me, poor panting heart, athirst with the length of the course. Come and find in these living waters the secret of new energy for other journeys. Withdraw thyself a little from the crowd that is unable to offer thee the nourishment required by thy exhausted strength. Come apart and, rest a little™ In the peace and quiet thou shalt enjoy being with Me, not only wilt thou soon recapture thy first vigor, but also wilt thou learn how to do more work with less expense of strength. Elias, disheartened, discouraged, found his strength renewed in an instant by a certain mysterious bread. Even so, My apostle, in this enviable task of co-redeemer that it has pleased Me to impose upon thee, I offer thee the chance, both by My word, which is all life, and by My grace, that is, by My Blood, to direct thy spirit once again towards the horizons of eternity and to renew the pact of friendship between thy heart and Mine. Come, I will console thee for the sorrows and deceptions of the journey. And thou shalt temper once again the steel of thy resolutions in the furnace of My love.” “Come to Me all you that labor and are heavily burdened and I will refresh you.” “ 

c. It Multiplies His Energies and His Merits “Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace which is Christ Jesus.”"” Grace is a participation in the life of the man-God. The creature possesses a certain measure of strength and can, in a certain sense, be qualified and defined as a force. But Christ is power in its very essence. In Him dwells in all its fullness the power of the Father, the omnipotence of divine action, and His Spirit is called the Spirit of Power. “O Jesus,” cries St. Gregory Nazianzen, “in Thee alone dwells all my strength.” 

I shall continue this later....pray for me, pray for the Church. When Christ comes back to judge us all, we shall see the Holy Wounds, as His Passion and Death saved us, but will also judge those who reject Him.

A Sudden Return to The Soul of The Apostolate

An unusual event made me return to the book I shared with you last week, The Soul of The Apostolate.

I would like to tie this section of the book to this event. A weak person I know, a man who admits to me that he is weak in the spiritual life, a beginner, had to perform a duty he did not expect. This person felt stretched and stressed by the people in his work world who are not really Christians. But, he also felt threatened by the really confident and active persons around him who claimed to be Christians. As a reflective person, he realized that his lack of prayer made him vulnerable to a loss of hope, a hardening of the heart, or a turning to craven fear, as he could see he was not up to the task he was asked to do.

Being around very confident and active people, this man fell into one temptation after another, until he felt he could not fulfill his responsibilities.  Then, he realized his complete dependence on God and prayer; that without prayer, he would fall into the worst sins of either presumption or despair, the twin sins of pride. He "woke up" to the fact that even the weakest member of the Church could be proud, and that all his venial sins came from this predominant fault.

How fortunate for him that he saw his weakness and finally called upon Our Lady Mary and Our Lord to help him with his task.

He has yet to complete this task, but he feels assured of help. Prayer first, action second.

How unlike this man is to the hyper-active one in his company. They both work "for the Church", but one in an unceasing pursuit of activity, and the other, my friend, in the awareness that prayer must precede action.

Here is a section from the book which illuminates what this man learned on his job.

A very active and energetic man, invited by us, at the beginning of a retreat, to look into his conscience and seek out the principal cause of his unhappiness, gave a perfect diagnosis in this answer which may seem at first sight incomprehensible: “My self-sacrifice is what has ruined me! My nature and temperament make it a joy for me to spend myself, and a pleasure to serve. What with the apparent success of my enterprises, the devil has contrived, for long years, to make everything work together for my deception, stirring me up to furious activity, filling me with disgust for all interior life, and finally leading me over the edge of the abyss.” This abnormal, not to say monstrous state of mind can be explained in one word. The worker for God, carried away by the pleasure of giving free rein to his natural energy, had let the divine life fade out, and thus lost the supernatural heat which had been stored up in him to make his apostolate effective and which would have helped his soul to resist the encroachments of the numbing ice of natural motives. He had worked, indeed, but far from the rays of the lifegiving sun. Magnae vires et cursus celerrimus, sed praeter viarn.* At the same time, his works, in them-selves very holy, had turned against the apostle like a weapon dangerous to wield, a two-edged sword which wounds the man who does not know how to use it. St. Bernard was warning Pope Bl. Eugenius III against just such a danger as this when he wrote: “I fear, lest in the midst of your occupations without number, you may lose hope of ever getting through with them, and allow your heart to harden. It would be very prudent of you to withdraw from such occupations, even if it be only for a little while, rather than let them get the better of you, and, little by little, lead you where you do not want to go. And where, you will ask, is that? To indifference. “Such is the end to which these accursed tasks (hae occupationes maledictae) will lead you; that is, if you keep on as you have begun, giving yourself entirely to diem, keeping nothing of yourself, for yourself.” “ Is there anything more lofty and more sacred than the government of the Church? Is there anything more useful for the glory of God and for the good of souls? And yet “accursed task,” St. Bernard calls them, if they are going to stand in the way of the interior life of the one who gives himself to them. What an expression, “accursed tasks/” It calls for a whole book, so terrifying is it, and so powerfully does it force one to think! It might arouse protest did it not flow from the pen of one so precise as a Doctor of the Church, a St. Bernard. 

2. The Active Worker Who Has No Interior Life 

To sum up such a one in a word; perhaps he is not yet tepid, but he is bound to become so. However, when a man is tepid, with a tepidity that is not merely in the feelings, or due to weakness, but residing in the will, that man has resigned himself to consent habitually to levity and neglect, or at any rate to cease fighting them. He has come to terms with deliberate venial sin, and by that very fact, he has robbed his soul of its assurance of eternal salvation. Indeed, he is disposing and even leading it on to mortal sin.10 Such also is St. Alphonsus’ teaching on tepidity, so well expounded by his disciple, Fr. Desurmont.11 Now how is it that, without an interior life, the active worker inevitably slides into tepidity? Inevitably, we say; and the only proof we need for this is the statement of a missionary bishop to his priests, a statement all the more terrifying by its truth, since it comes straight from a heart consumed with zeal for good works and filled with a spirit that goes clean contrary to anything that smacks of quietism. “There is one thing,” said Cardinal Lavigerie, “one thing of which you must be fully persuaded, and it is that for an apostle there is no halfway between total sanctity, at least faithfully and courageously desired and sought after, and absolute perversion.”

My friend, who does not mind that I share these thoughts and happenings and who believes his story will help others, also realized that his prayer had merely been sheer day-dreaming, a playing of his impure imagination, not a real meeting with God. What brought him to his senses was an event which brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

He saw how unloving and mediocre his faith had been, but he also saw, that the rule, the measure of faith was not the amount of good works he did, but the intense quality of the work, doing his task for God alone and not men, being a true servant of Christ.

His sharing reminded me of this passage from the book:

Fr. (or Mr.) So-and-So feels within himself a growing desire to consecrate himself to good works. He has no experience whatever. But his liking for the apostolate gives us the right to suppose that he has a certain amount of fire, some impetuosity of character, is fond of action, and also perhaps, inclined to relish a bit of a fight. Let us imagine him to be correct in his conduct, a man of piety and even to devotion; but his piety is more in the feelings than in the will, and his devotion is not the light reflected by a soul resolute in seeking nothing but the good pleasure of God, but a pious routine, the result of praiseworthy habits. Mental prayer, if indeed he practices it at all, is for him a species of day-dreaming, and his spiritual reading is governed by curiosity, without any real influence on his conduct. Perhaps the devil even eggs him on by reason of an illusory artistic sense, which the poor soul mistakes for an “inner life,” to dabble in treatises on the lofty and extraordinary paths of union with God, and these fill him with admiration and enthusiasm. All in all, there is little genuine inner life, if any at all, in this soul which still has, we grant, a certain number of good habits, many natural assets and a certain loyal desire to be faithful to God; but that desire is altogether too vague. There you have our apostle, filled with his desire to throw himself into active works, and on the point of entering upon this ministry which is so completely new to him. It is not long before circumstances that inevitably arise from these works (as will readily be understood by anyone who has led the active life) produce a thousand-and-one occasions to draw him more and more out of himself; there are countless appeals to his naive curiosity, unnumbered occasions of falling into sin from which we may suppose he has hitherto been protected by the peaceful atmosphere of his home, his seminary, his community, or his novitiate — or at least by the guidance of an experienced director. Not only is there an increasing dissipation-, or the ever growing danger of a curiosity that has to find out all about everything; not only more and more displays of impatience or injured feelings, of vanity or jealousy, presumption or dejection, partiality or detraction, but there is also a progressive development of the weaknesses of his soul and of all the more or less subtle forms of sensuality. And all these foes are preparing to force an unrelenting battle upon this soul so ill-prepared for such violent and unceasing attacks. And it therefore falls victim to frequent wounds! Indeed, it is a wonder when there is any resistance at all on the part of a soul whose piety is so superficial — a soul already captivated by the too natural satisfaction it takes in pouring out its energies and exercising all its talents upon a worthy cause! Besides, the devil is wide awake, on the look-out for his anticipated prey. And far from disturbing this sense of satisfaction, he does all in his power to encourage it. Yet a day comes when the soul scents danger. The .guardian angel has had something to say: conscience has registered a protest. Now would be the time to take hold of himself, to examine himself in the calm atmosphere of a retreat, to resolve to draw up a schedule and follow it rigorously, even at the cost of neglecting the occasions of trouble to which he has become so attached. 

And, this is what my friend discovered, the absolute need for a schedule for prayer. But, he also saw the pit he narrowly avoided, one which many priests and laity have fallen into. Let Father Chautard continue....

This is what my friend escaped, just in time:

Alas! It is already late in the day! He has already tasted the pleasure of seeing his efforts crowned with the most encouraging success. “Tomorrow! tomorrow!” he mumbles. “Today, it is out of the question. There simply is no time. I have got to go on with this series of sermons, write this article, organize this committee, or that ‘charity,’ put on this play, go on that trip — or catch up with my mail.” How happy he is to reassure himself with all these pretexts! For the mere thought of being left alone, face to face with his own conscience, has become unbearable to him. The time has come when the devil can have a free hand to encompass the ruin of a soul that has shown itself disposed to be such a willing accomplice. The ground is prepared. Since activity has become a passion in his victim, he now fans it into a raging fever. Since it has become intolerable for him to even think of forgetting his urgent affairs and recollecting himself, the demon increases that loathing into sheer horror, and takes care at the same time to intoxicate the soul with fresh enterprises, skillfully colored with the attractive motives of God’s glory and the greater good of souls. And now our friend, up to so recently a man of virtuous habits, is going from weakness to ever greater weakness, and will soon place his foot upon an incline so slippery that he will be utterly unable to keep himself from falling. Deep in his heart he is miserable, and vaguely realizes that all this agitation is not according to the Heart of God, but the only result is that he hurls himself even more blindly into the whirlpool in order to drown his remorse. His faults are piled up to a fatal degree. Things that used to trouble the upright conscience of this man are now despised as vain scruples. He is fond of proclaiming that a man ought to live with the times, meet the enemy on equal terms, and so he praises the active virtues to the skies, expressing nothing but scorn for what he disdainfully calls “the piety of a bygone day.” Anyway, his enterprises prosper more than ever. Everybody is talking about them. Each day witnesses some new success. “God is blessing our work,” exclaims the deluded man, over whom, tomorrow, perhaps the angels will be weeping for a mortal sin. How did this soul fall into so lamentable a state? Inexperience, presumption, vanity, carelessness, and cowardice are the answer. Haphazardly, without stopping to reflect on his inadequate spiritual resources, he threw himself into the midst of dangers. When his reserves of the interior life ran out, he found himself in the position of an uncautious swimmer who has no longer the strength to fight against the current, and is being swept away to the abyss. 

After my friend finishes his last job at his present assignment, he is considering leaving the world and becoming either a contemplative, or a hermit. Why? He now knows he is too weak to handle the demands of the active life, a life demanding a holiness he does not have.  His newly found humility brings him to rely on God alone.

He shared that he was on the brink of a complete separation from reality, when God saved him by showing him what the good father who wrote this book describes below.

“Short of a miracle,” says St. Alphonsus, “a man who does not practice mental prayer will end up in mortal sin.” And St. Vincent de Paul tells us: “A man without mental prayer is not good for anything; he cannot even renounce the slightest thing. “It is merely the life of an animal.’” Some authors quote St. Theresa as having said: “Without mental prayer a person soon becomes either a brute or a devil. If you do not practice mental prayer, you don’t need any devil to throw you into hell, you throw yourself in there of your own accord. On the contrary, give me the greatest of all sinners; if he practices mental prayer, be it only for fifteen minutes every day, he will be converted. If he perseveres in it, his eternal salvation is assured.” The experience of priests and religious vowed to active works is enough to establish that an apostolic worker who, under pretext of being too busy or too tired, or else out of repugnance, or laziness, or some illusion, is too easily brought to cut down his meditation to ten or fifteen minutes instead of binding himself to half an hour’s serious mental prayer from which he might draw plenty of energy and drive for his day’s work, will inevitably fall into tepidity of the will. In this stage, it is no longer a matter of avoiding imperfections. His soul is crawling with venial sins. The ever growing impossibility of vigilance over his heart makes most of these faults pass unnoticed by his conscience. The soul has disposed itself in such a manner that it cannot and will not see. How will such a one fight against things which he no longer regards as defects? His lingering disease is already far advanced. Such is the consequence ....(of) the giving up of mental prayer and of a daily schedule

My friend shared that he saw the absolute need for scheduling "meetings with God" and keeping to that schedule. When he came back from a trip which took him to a part of the world with which he was not familiar, he recognized that he had to rely completely on God for peace, as he no longer had any self-confidence. Now, he was ready for complete dependence on God. He told me that this trip opened his eyes to the great amount of people in the world who were impervious to the interior life, afraid of both their reason and their emotions. They lacked the vigilance over their heart explained in the book I am quoting. He noted that he now came to the great insight that he had to rely on God for all good works. And how to prove this reliance on the Almighty, was prayer and a schedule.

My friend was one step away from this description of a lost soul:

Genuine prayer is no longer to be found in this soul. He prays in a rush, with interruptions that have not the slightest justification; all is done neglectfully, sleepily, with many delays, putting it off until the last minute, at the risk of being finally overcome by sleep. And, perhaps, now and again, he skips parts of the office and leaves them out. All of this transforms what should be a medicine into a poison. The sacrifice of praise becomes a long litany of sins, and sins which may end up by being more than venial.  

This good man was on the verge of complete insanity. And why? Here is more of the description of what he was about to become.

This disorder in the mind brings with it a corresponding unruliness in the imagination. Of all our powers, this one is the most in need of being repressed at this stage. And yet it never even occurs to him to put on the brakes! Therefore, having free rein, it runs wild. No exaggeration, no madness, is too much for it. And the progressive suppression of all mortification of the eyes soon gives this crazy tenant of his soul opportunities to forage wherever it wills, in lush pastures! The disorder pursues its course. From the mind and the imagination it gets down into the affections. The heart is filled with nothing but will-o’-the-wisps. What is going to become of this dissipated heart, scarcely concerned anymore with the Kingdom of God within itself? It has become insensible to the joys of intimacy with Christ, to the marvelous poetry of the Mysteries, to the severe beauty of the Liturgy, to the appeals and attractions of God in the Blessed Eucharist. It is, in a word, insensible to the influences of the supernatural world. What will become of it? Shall it concentrate upon itself? Suicide! No. It must have affection. No longer finding happiness in God, it will love creatures. It is at the mercy of the first occasion for such love. It flings itself without prudence or control into the breach, without a care perhaps even for the most sacred of vows, nor for the highest interests of the Church, nor even for its own reputation. Let us suppose that such a heart would still be upset by the thought of apostasy—and profoundly so. But still, it feels far less fear at the thought of scandalizing souls. Thanks be to God, it is doubtless the exception for anyone to follow this course to the very limit. But is there anyone incapable of seeing that this getting tired of God, and accepting forbidden pleasures, can drag the heart down to the worst of disasters? Starting from the fact that “the sensual man perceiveth not the things that are of the Spirit of God,” 1!l we must necessarily end up with: “He who was reared in the purple has embraced dung.” 20 Obstinate clinging to illusion, blindness of mind, hardness of heart all follow one another in progressive stages. We can expect anything. To crown his misfortunes, the will is now found to be, though not destroyed, reduced to’ such a state of weakness and flabbiness that it is practically impotent. Do not ask him to fight back with vigor; that would make a simple effort, and all you will get will be the despairing answer, “I can’t.” Now a man who is no longer capable of making any effort, at this stage, is on the way to dreadful calamities.

And, here comes the great insight of this friend of mine--that the reason there is so much homosexuality in the priesthood even at the level of the bishops, is that the imagination of these men spun out of control because of the setting aside of the discipline of prayer and the keeping of a schedule.

How can such a serious sin follow something which seems merely like "time management" problems? The hyper-active priests forgot the one thing necessary--the bridal love for Christ. Here is yet one more selection from the book. The lack of silence and prayer allowed the imagination to go wild and want more and more involvement with humans instead of with God. Pride and homosexuality grew together in the soul and in the body.  He believes that the sin of the action is not a great rebellion, but a great deception of the imagination seeking gods rather than God. In other words, one falls into idolatry.

That admirable Jesuit, Fr. Lallemant, takes us right back to the first cause of these disasters when he says: “There are many apostolic workers who never do anything purely for God. In all things, they seek themselves, and they are always secretly mingling their own interests with the glory of God in the best of their work. And so they spend their life in this intermingling of nature and grace. Finally death comes along, and then alone do they open their eyes, behold their deception, and tremble at the approach of the formidable judgment of God.” 21  

Here it is in a nutshell--self-love instead of self-denial; activity without grace; imagination without purification; the lack of humility.

The event to which I referred was this man's awakening to the fact of his complete and utter dependence on God and the fact that he could do no good without prayer. He is a recovering workaholic and a beginner in true prayer.

His story is why I returned today to The Soul of The Apostolate. He noted that until he comes into the illuminative state, he will remain hidden and ask God for a new apostolate.

Since holiness is nothing but the interior life carried to such a point that the will is in close union with the will of God, ordinarily, and short of a miracle of grace, the soul will not arrive at this point without traveling through all the stages of the purgative and illuminative lives — and that with many and grueling efforts. Let us take note of a law of the spiritual life, that all through the course of the sanctification of a soul, the activity of God and that of the soul are in inverse proportion to one another. From day to day God does more and more of the work, and the soul does less and less. The activity of God in the souls of the perfect is something quite different from His activity in the souls of beginners. In the latter, being less obvious, it consists mostly in inciting and sustaining vigilance and suppliant prayer, thus offering them a means of obtaining grace for new efforts. But, the perfect God acts in a much more complete fashion, and sometimes all He asks is a simple consent, that will unite the soul to His supreme action.

maybe to be continued....one more paragraph from Father Chautard:

Beginners, even the tepid soul and the sinner, whom the Lord wants to draw close to Himself, feel themselves first of all moved to seek God, then to prove to Him more and more their desire of pleasing Him, and finally to rejoice in all providential opportunities that permit them to dislodge self-love from its throne and set up, in its place, the reign of Christ alone. In such cases, the action of God is confined to stimulation and to help. In the saint this action is far more powerful and far more entire. In the midst of weariness and suffering, satiated with humiliations or crushed by illness, the saint has nothing to do but abandon himself to the divine action; otherwise he would be unable to bear the torments which, according to the designs of God, are intended to bring his perfection to full maturity. In him is fully realized the text: “God put all things under Him that God may be all in all.”‘” He depends so completely upon Christ for all things that he seems no longer to live by himself. Such was the testimony of the apostle, with regard to himself: “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.” 2S It is the spirit of Christ alone that does the thinking and the acting, and makes all the decisions. No doubt this divinization is far from achieving the intensity that it will have in glory, and yet this state already reflects the characteristics of the beatific union

From The Soul of The Apostolate, Part Seven

The book, The Soul of the Apostolate, I have been using this week on the blog for meditations, praises my favourite, St. Bernard of Clairvaux many times, using his as a perfect example of the interior life leading to the active life.

Here is one reference:

 Take St. Bernard, for example. This oracle of his own time was one of those saints who showed most firmness in his zeal for God. But the attentive reader of his life will be able to see to what an extent the interior life had made this man-of-God selfless. He only fell back on strong measures when he had clear evidence that all other means were useless. Often, too, he varied between gentleness and strength. After having shown his great love for souls by avenging some principle with holy indignation and stern demands for remedies, reparation, guarantees, and promises, he would at once display the tenderness of a mother in the conversion of those whom his conscience had’ forced him to fight. Pitiless towards the errors of Abelard, he speedily became the friend of the one whom his victory had reduced to silence. When it was a matter of choosing means, if he saw that no principle was necessarily involved, he always stood before the hierarchy of the Church as a champion of nonviolent procedure. Learning that there was a movement on foot to ruin and massacre the Jews of Germany, he left his cloister without a moment’s delay and hurried to their rescue, preaching a crusade of peace. Fr. Ratisbonne quotes a document of great significance in his Life of St. Bernard. It is a statement of the most exalted Rabbi of that land, expressing his admiration for the monk of Clairvaux, “without whom,” he says, “there would not be one of us alive in Germany.” And he urges future generations of Jews never to forget the debt of gratitude they owe to the holy abbot. On this oc-casion St. Bernard uttered the following words: “We are the soldiers of peace, we are the army of the peacemakers, fighting for God and peace: Deo et pact militantibus. Persuasion, good example, loyalty to God are the only arms worthy of the children of the Gospel.” There is no substitute for the interior life as a means of obtaining this spirit of selflessness which characterizes the zeal of every saint.  

And, another:

As a member of the Cistercian Order, so completely consecrated to Mary, and as a child of that great saint who was, for half a century, the apostle of Europe, St. Bernard, how can we forget that the holy abbot of Clairvaux attributed to Mary all his progress in union with Jesus, and all his success in the apostolate? Everybody knows what tremendous effects were produced by the apostolate of this saint, who remains the most illustrious of the sons of St. Benedict: an apostolate that embraced nations and kings, Councils and even Popes. On all sides we hear the praises of the sanctity, the genius, the deep knowledge of Holy Scripture, and the penetrating unction of the writings of this the last of the Fathers of the Church. But one title above all others sums up all the admiration of the ages for this holy doctor: Cytha-rista Mariae, “the Harpist of Mary.” This “Bard of Mary” has never been surpassed by any of those who have proclaimed the glories of the Mother of God. St. Bernardine of Siena and St. Francis of Sales, as well as Bossuet, St. Alphonsus, St. Grignon de Monfort, and so on, all draw largely upon the treasures of St. Bernard when they want to speak of her, and find arguments to support that great truth which the holy Doctor so emphasized: “Everything comes to us through Mary.” “See, my brethren, with what sentiments of devotion God has desired us to honor Mary, He Who has placed in her the fullness of all good. If there is in us any hope, any grace, any pledge of salvation, let us admit that all this overflows upon us from her who is flowing with delights. . . . Suppose you were to take away the sun, which enlightens the world: what would become of the day? Take away Mary, that star of the sea, of our huge, vast sea, what is left but deep obscurity, the shadow of death, pitchy blackness? Therefore it is from the depths of our hearts, from the very vitals of our being, and with all our mind and will that we must honor the Virgin Mary: for such is the will of Him Who willed us to have all through Mary.”106 Strong with the strength of this doctrine we will not hesitate to lay down as a principle that no matter what the apostle may do to ensure salvation and spiritual progress and the fruitfulness of his apostolate, he runs the risk of finding that he has built on sand if his activity does not rest on a very special devotion to Our Lady. a. For His Personal Interior Life The apostle cannot claim to have a sufficient devotion to Our Lady if his confidence in her is not enthusiastic, and if his homage to her is almost entirely external. Like her Son, intuetur cor, she only looks at our hearts, and judges us to be her true children only by the power with which our love corresponds to hers. She looks to find a heart that is firmly convinced of the glories and privileges and offices of her who is at the same time the Mother of God and the Mother of men: A heart that is convinced of this truth: that the fight against faults, the acquisition of virtues, the Kingdom of Christ in souls, and consequently all guarantee of salvation and sanctity, are in proportion to the degree of our devotion to Mary;10T A heart that is gripped with the thought that everything is easier, more delightful, and progresses more rapidly in the interior life when we act in union with Mary.108 A heart full to overflowing of filial confidence, come what may, in her whose gentle tact, and wise anticipation of our needs, and whose tenderness and mercy and generosity we know by experience;108 My little children, she it is who is the foundation of all my trust and the whole reason for all my hope (St. Bernard). 

more later...one more on this book

Continuing with The Soul of The Apostolate

I suggest to my readers, as I did before, to get and read this book.  

God wants us to love our neighbor as ourselves, but never more than ourselves, that is, never to such an extent that we harm our own souls. And in practice, this is as much as if He demanded that we take more care of our own soul than of those others, since our zeal must be regulated by charity, and “Prima sibi charitas”4″ is an axiom of theology. “I love Jesus Christ,” said St. Alphonsus Liguori, ” and that is why I am on fire with the desire to give Him souls, first of all my own, and then an incalculable number of others.” This is a practical application of St. Bernard’s Tuus esto ubique” and that other principle of the holy abbot of Clairvaux: “No man is truly wise, who is not wise for himself.” 45 St. Bernard, who was himself a rare miracle of apostolic zeal, followed this rule. Geoffrey of Auxerre, his secretary, depicts him as: Tot us primum sibi et sic totus omnibus. “He belonged, first of all, entirely to himself, and thus he belonged entirely to all men.”  

When I lose my peace, it is because I have not prayed intently. When I am impatient, it is because I have not prayed enough. I have to rely entirely on God for all goodness which is in me.

God has given me the grace to recognize that the big obstacle to my acquiring a peaceful and fruitful interior life is my natural activity, and my tendency to be carried away by my work. And I have recognized, besides, that this lack of interior life is the source of all my faults, all my troubles, my dryness, my fits of disgust, and my bad health.

Too much activity causes a whirlwind of chaos in families. Jesus is our example--30 years of silence, 40 days of retreat, and then, and only then, three years of active ministry.

Let us consider the mortal life of Our Lord, a perfect realization of the divine plan. Thirty years of recollection and solitude, then forty days of retreat and penance are the prelude to His brief evangelical career. How often, too, during His apostolic journeys, we see Him retiring to the mountains or the desert to pray: “He retired into the desert and prayed,” or passing the night in prayer: “He passed the whole night in the prayer of God.”

More later....

The Most Important Words I Have Read Today

With Jesus, the interior soul hears the voice of the world’s crime rising up to heaven and calling down chastisement upon the guilty; and this soul delays the sentence by the omnipotence of suppliant prayer, which is able to stay the hand of God, just when He is about to let loose His thunderbolt. “Those who pray,” said the eminent statesman Donoso Cortes, after his conversion, “do more for the world than those who fight, and if the world is going from bad to worse, it is because there are more battles than prayers.” “Hands uplifted,” said Bossuet, “rout more battalions than hands that strike.” And in the midst of their desert, the solitaries of the Thebaid often had burning in their hearts the fire that animated St. Francis Xavier. “They seemed to some,” said St. Augustine, “to have abandoned the world more than they should have.” Videntur nonnullis res humanas plus quam oportet deseruisse. But, he adds, people forget that their prayers, purified by this complete separation from the world, were all the more powerful and more NECESSARY for a depraved society.  

and

And yet now, after fifty years of freedom of education in France, after this half century that has beheld the birth of works without number, and during which we have had, in our hands, the youth of the land, and have enjoyed the almost complete support of the various governments, how is it that, in spite of results that appear, outwardly, to be quite striking, we have been unable to form, in our nation, a majority with enough real Christianity in it to fight against the coalition of the followers of Satan? No doubt, the abandonment of the liturgical life and the cessation of its influence upon the faithful have contributed to this impotence. Our spirituality has become narrow, dry, superficial, external, or altogether sentimental; it does not have the penetration and soul-stirring power that only the Liturgy, that great source of Christian vitality, can give. But is there not another cause to be traced to the fact that we priests and educators, because we lack an intense inner life, are unable to beget in souls anything more than a surface piety, without any powerful ideals or strong convictions? Those of us who are professors: have we not, perhaps, been more ambitious for the distinction of degrees and for the reputation of our colleges than to impart a solid religious instruction to souls? Have we not worn ourselves out on less important things than forming of wills, and imprinting on well-tried characters the stamp of Jesus Christ?

And has not the most frequent cause of this mediocrity been the common banality of our inner life? If the priest is a saint (the saying goes), the people will be fervent; if the priest is fervent, the people will be pious; if the priest is pious, the people will at least be decent. But if the priest is only decent, the people will be godless. The spiritual generation is always one degree less intense in its life than those who beget it in Christ. 

Soul of The Apostolate

The Soul of The Apostolate, Four

"Princess alice collision in thames". Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Princess_alice_collision_in_thames.jpg#/media/File:Princess_alice_collision_in_thames.jpg

Ruined by activist heretics,. our Church now will suffer as our living generations have not seen in the so-called "free world".  God in the Tabernacle has been ignored, even mocked.

I am still waiting to hear a priest in the two churches where I go to Mass daily and on Sunday say something about the decision a week ago. The silent crushes the entire community of the faithful here

Full steam ahead! And while the helmsman is admiring the rapidity of his progress, God sees that, since the pilot does not know his job, the ship is off the course and is in danger of being wrecked. What Our Lord is looking for, above all, is adorers in spirit and in truth. But these activistic heretics, for their part, imagine that they are giving greater glory to God in aiming above all at external results. This state of mind is the explanation why, in our day, in spite of the appreciation still shown for schools, dispensaries, missions, and hospitals, devotion to God in its interior form, by penance and prayer, is less and less understood. No longer able to believe in the value of immolation that nobody sees, your activist will not be content merely to treat as slackers and visionaries those who give themselves, in the cloister, to prayer and penance with an ardor for souls equal to that of the most tireless missionary; but he will also roar with laughter at those active workers who consider it indispensable to snatch a few minutes from even the most useful occupations, in order to go and purify and rekindle their energy before the Tabernacle and to obtain from its Divine Guest, better results for their work.

Many, many years ago, two highly educated and non-Christian people, also very intelligent, but lacking in grace, told me  that they thought Catholicism was a morbid religion, because we stressed penance, suffering, mortification. They wanted Christians to be like everyone else, agreeing with their views of a prosperous lifestyle, comfortable niche in this world, and freedom from restrictions as to how they lived.

Some Catholics believe the same lie of activity and deeds bringing about salvation. We call people "good" who are not "good". 

God is allowing us all to face reality.

If I do not raise enough money for the small house of prayer, I shall continue in my life of suffering, mortification, and being a fool for Christ wherever I am. But, I shall not be able to devote myself to the daily discipline of prayer as I so desire-which is merely to be in the presence of the Bridegroom, offering up intense interior prayer, which can only be done in stability. Father notes, and this is noted later in this post, that one must be in control of one's environment in order to enter into contemplation. This idea is even more important now.

The state of mind which does not value this may be one reason why I have not succeeded so far. Where are the courageous ones who want to pray on the front lines of spiritual warfare? Where are those who want to support such a small, but necessary effort. But, it takes great effort to enter into the massive, unlimited activity of God in the world. This is partly what the contemplative does-join with God in the silent activity of His life in order to bring life into this world.

Father states in his book...There is no metaphor capable of giving any idea of the infinite intensity of the activity going on in the bosom of Almighty God. Such is the inner life of the Father, that it engenders a Divine Person. From the interior life of the Father and Son proceeds the Holy Spirit. The inner life that was communicated to the apostles in the Cenacle at once aroused them to zealous action. To anyone who knows anything about it and who does not contrive to disfigure the truth, this interior life is a principle of devoted and self-sacrificing action. But even if it did not reveal itself by outward manifestations, the life of prayer is, intimately and of itself, a source of activity beyond compare. Nothing could be more false than to consider it as a sort of oasis, offering itself as a refuge to those who want to let their life flow by in tranquil ease. The mere fact that it is the shortest road to the Kingdom of Heaven means that the text: “The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away,” 25 is applicable in a most special manner, to the life of prayer.

How refreshing to find Father using the same phrase I have used over and over again on this blog from the words of Christ Himself.

"The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away."

Those who are willing to either do violence to their own wills and bodies through mortification, or those who allow God to work this out in their lives are those who "bear" the Kingdom of God away.

God takes us up into His suffering, His passion. We do not join ours with Him, that is arrogance. He invites us to be part of His work of salvation of souls on earth by carrying His Cross with Him, enduring suffering with Him.

Dom Sebastian Wyart was familiar with the labors of the ascetic as well as with the trials of army life, the cares of the student, and the responsibilities inseparable from the office of a superior, and he used to say that there were three kinds of works: 

1. The almost exclusively physical work of those who live by manual labor, by a craft, or in the army. And he declares that, no matter what one may think about it, this kind of work is the easiest of the three. St. Benedict asks his followers for work, as it actually relieves the intensity of contemplation, besides being necessary.

The intellectual toil of the scholar, the thinker, in his often arduous pursuit of truth; that of the writer, of the professor, who put everything they have into the effort to communicate all they know to others; of the diplomat, the financier, the engineer and so on, as well as the intellectual labor required of a general during a battle if he is to foresee and direct everything and make the proper decisions. This labor in itself is, he said, far more difficult than the first kind, for there is a saying that “the blade wears out its sheath.” 

Research, reading, finding and sharing the truth, writing has been mostly the focus of my work, even on this blog. This is hard, but a real joy, as these things have been my vocation as well as prayer. Of course, I have not earned a living from blogging, although some readers have helped me considerably. I have never wanted fame on this blog, only the relentless pursuit of truth and the saving of souls, as well as the leading of the saved to sainthood, including myself, through these efforts.

3. Finally, there is the labor of the interior life. And he did not hesitate to declare that of the three, this kind, when it is taken seriously, is by far the most exacting. But at the same time, it is this kind that offers us the most satisfaction here on earth. It is likewise the most important. It goes to make up not so much a man’s profession as the man himself. How many there are who can boast of great courage in the first two types of labor, which lead to wealth and fame, but who, when it comes to the effort to acquire virtue, are totally deficient in ambition, energy, or courage.

A man who is determined to acquire an interior life must take, for his ideal, unremitting domination of self and complete control over his environment, in order to act in all things solely for the glory of God. 

This is key--which is why I am begging for the little house of contemplative prayer. I am not allowed to be in charge of my environment, as a fool for Christ. The glory of God on this earth is thwarted by the lack of discipline, which one can set up if one has the desire to do so.

To achieve this aim, he must strive, under all circumstances, to keep united with Jesus Christ and thus to keep his eye on the end he has in view, and to evaluate everything according to the standard of the Gospel. Quo vadam, et ad quid? he keeps saying, with St. Ignatius. And so, everything in him, intelligence and will, as well as memory, feelings, imagination, and senses, depends on principle. 

This paragraph describes me. And, those who do not live by principle cannot and will not understand this interior search for the Indwelling of the Trinity

But to achieve this result, what an effort it will cost him! Whether he is mortifying himself or permitting himself some legitimate enjoyment, whether he is thinking or acting, at work or at rest, loving what is good or turning away in repugnance from what is evil, whether he is moved by desire or by fear, joy or sorrow, fear or hope, whether he feels indignation or is calm; in all things, and always, he endeavors to keep his course dead ahead, in the direction of God’s good pleasure. 

Nothing without God, nothing without asking daily for His Will to be done in all things.....

At prayer, and especially before the Blessed Sacrament, he isolates himself more completely than ever from all visible things, that he may come to converse with the invisible God as if he saw Him.  in the midst of his apostolic labors he will manage to realize this ideal, which St. Paul admired in Moses. 

It is too easy to become distracted. Last year, someone I know said of me to a friend, "She is very focused". But, even I have to tear myself away from those I serve, those I love in order to pray, which is my first duty and call. This book encourages me....I pray you all do as well. The life of the contemplative by definition is one of being alone with God, but one needs the moral support of those who understand Father Chautard's message. 

What a job! And yet it is not hard to understand how God rewards, even here below, with special joys, those who do not flinch at the effort which this work demands. “Idlers?” Dom Sebastian concludes, “Are these true religious, or these truly interior and zealous priests idlers? Nonsense! Let the busiest men of affairs in the world come and take a look at our life, and see how their labors compare with ours!” Who does not know this from experience? There are times when we might be inclined to prefer long hours in some exhausting occupation to half an hour of serious mental prayer, to an attentive hearing of Mass, or to the careful and intelligent recitation of the Breviary.

to be continued...

From The Soul of The Apostolate, Three

I shall do a little mini-series on this excellent book.  One of the things which Fr. Chautard emphasizes is that political actions and religious activity mean nothing if not backed up with prayer. The good priest reminds us that God created us to have a rich interior life, which leads to union with him.

Secum vivebat St. Gregory the Great said of Benedict--He lived with himself. By cultivating a relationship with God, we come to know ourselves and God. Living in the present moment with God means living with ourselves fully as well. This problem of running away from one's true self mars the growth of our own culture. What Father describes here is the focus of my life, and that of every true Catholic who has fallen in love with God.

To live with oneself, within oneself; to desire self-control, and not allow oneself to be dominated by exterior things; to reduce the imagination, the feelings, and even the intelligence and memory to the position of servants of the will and to make this will conform, without ceasing, with the will of God: all this is a program that is less and less welcome to a century of excitement that has seen the birth of a new ideal: the love of action for action’s sake. Any pretext will serve, if we can only escape this discipline of our faculties: business, family problems, health, good reputation, patriotism, the honor of one’s congregation, and the pretended glory of God, all vie with one another in preventing us from living within ourselves. This sort of frenzy for exterior life finally succeeds in gaining over us an attraction which we can no longer resist. 

Over activity leads to self-deceit. One can think one is doing good deeds for God when in reality God has been set aside . Daily, I see in this country people hiding from God, letting themselves be distracted by things, people, action, action, action.

Frenzy is from Satan. Period. Novelty is from the Evil One. Distractions kill the life of the soul.

And, unless Americans think I am picking unduly on them, Father Chautard is only too aware of the heresy of Americanism, which includes an unhealthy preoccupation with good deeds and building a physical Kingdom of God, rather than a spiritual one.

Is there any reason to be surprised, then, that the interior life is neglected? “Neglected” is putting it mildly. It is often enough despised and turned to ridicule by the very people who ought to be the first to appreciate its advantages and its necessity. This situation even called forth the celebrated letter of Leo XIII to Cardinal Gibbons,in protest against the disastrous consequences of an exclusive admiration for active works.  

I feel today as if this good priest is speaking to me personally-with my desire to set up a place for the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus. 

Priests are so anxious to avoid the effort required to live an interior life that they reach the point of overlooking the value of living with Christ, in Christ and through Christ, and of forgetting that everything, in the plan of Redemption, is based on the Eucharistic life as much as it is upon the rock of Peter. The unconscious preoccupation of these partisans of a spirituality that is all noise and fanfare, is to thrust what is essential into the background. True, the Church has not yet become for them a Protestant chapel; the Tabernacle is not yet empty. But in their eyes, the Eucharistic life can hardly be adapted to the needs of modern civilization, still less can it suffice for its needs. The interior life, which is a necessary consequence of the Eucharistic life, has had its day. For the people steeped in these theories, and their number is legion, Holy Communion has lost the true meaning which the early Christians were able to see in it. They believe in the Eucharist, yes; but they no longer see in it something absolutely necessary, both to their works and to themselves. We must not be astonished, then, that since they have lost nearly all ability to converse intimately with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, as with a friend, they have come to consider the interior life as a memory of the Middle Ages.

So, as we are only too aware, the Church has come under attack, even by priests, who want to protestantize the Mass and all the sacraments, as well as uglify the churches in the name of progress. Contemplation is a lost art, a misplaced goal, in this country. And, to placate those who have ridicules the life of prayer in monasteries and convents in the past, too many Catholics have fallen into the false ideal which states that actions are more important than prayer.

Hard words follow....

Imperceptibly, a number of the faithful, and even of priests and religious, follow this cult of action to the point of making it a kind of dogma which inspires their attitude and all their actions, and leads them to throw themselves without restraint into a life of extroversion. “The Church, the diocese, the parish, the congregation, the work has need of me,” we can almost hear them say, “God finds me pretty useful.” And if no one dares come right out with such a piece of stupidity, nevertheless there exists, deep down in the heart, the presumption on which it is based and the lack of faith which fomented it.  

I have written before that the worst thing which has happened has been the destruction of the quiet, prayerful home, centered around the heart of the home, the stay-at-home mum, would can pray and set up the discipline and schedule necessary for all in the family to become saints. The quiet, peaceful home is rare, as contemplation flees a house of chaotic, ceaseless action. 

More later,...busybakson, and how ironic....

From The Soul of the Apostolate

A list of truths from this phenomenal book. The finding of this book seems timely to me. This priest's writings remind me of Brother Lawrence, and de Caussade. My few comments are in blue.

Without embarking upon a study of asceticism, let us at least remind the reader that EVERYONE is obliged to accept the following principles as absolutely certain, and base his inner life upon them.

FIRST TRUTH. Supernatural life is the life of Jesus Christ Himself in my soul, by Faith, Hope, and Charity; for Jesus is the meritorious, exemplary, and final cause of sanctifying grace, and, as Word, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, He is its efficient cause in our souls.

The presence of Our Lord by this supernatural life is not the real presence proper to Holy Communion, but a presence of vital action like that of the action of the head or heart upon the members of the body. This action lies deep within us, and God ordinarily hides it from the soul in order to increase the merit of our faith. And so, as a rule, my natural faculties have no feeling of this action going on within me, which, however, I am formally obliged to believe by faith. This action is divine, yet it does not interfere with my free will, and makes use of all secondary causes, events, persons, and things, to teach me the will of God and to offer me an opportunity of acquiring or increasing my share in the divine life.

This life, begun in Baptism by the state of grace, perfected at Confirmation, recovered by Penance and enriched by the Holy Eucharist, is my Christian life.

SECOND TRUTH. By this life, Jesus Christ imparts to me His Spirit. In this way, He becomes the principle of a superior activity which raises me up, provided I do not obstruct it, to think, judge, love, will, suffer, labor with Him, by Him, in Him, and like Him. My outward acts become the manifestations of this life of Jesus in me. And thus I tend to realize the ideal of the INTERIOR LIFE that was formulated by St. Paul when he said: “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

Christian life, piety, interior life, sanctity: in all these we find no essential difference. They are only different degrees of one and the same love. They are the half-light, the dawning, the rising, and the zenith of the same sun.

Whenever the expression “interior life” is used in this book, the reference is not so much to habitual interior life, which we may call the “principal” or “capital” of the divine life deposited in us, by sanctifying grace, as to the actual interior life, which invests this capital and puts it to work in the activity of our soul, and in our fidelity to actual graces.

Thus I can define it as the state of activity of a soul which strives against its natural inclinations in order to REGULATE them, and endeavors to acquire the HABIT of judging and directing its movements IN ALL THINGS according to the light of the Gospel and the example of Our Lord.

Hence: a twofold movement. By the first, the soul withdraws from all that is opposed to the supernatural life in created things, and seeks at all times to be recollected: aversio a creaturis. By the second, the soul tends upwards to God, and unites itself with Him: conversio ad Deum.

The soul wishes in this way to be faithful to the grace which Our Lord offers to it at every moment. In a word, it lives, united to Jesus, and carries out in actuality the principle: “He that liveth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit.

Qui manet in Me et Ego in eo, hic fert fructum tum (Joan. 15:5).

THIRD TRUTH. I would be depriving myself of one of the most effective means of acquiring this interior life if I failed to strive after a precise and certain faith in the active presence of Jesus within me, and if I did not try to make this presence within me, not merely a living, but an extremely vital reality, and one which penetrated more and more into all the life of my faculties. When Jesus, in this manner, becomes my light, my ideal, my counsel, my support, my refuge, my strength, my healer, my consolation, my joy, my love, in a word, my life, I shall acquire all the virtues. Then alone will I be able to utter, with sincerity, the wonderful prayer of St. Bonaventure which the Church gives me for my thanksgiving after Mass: Transfige dulcissime Domine Jesu.

FOURTH TRUTH. In proportion to the intensity of my love for God, my supernatural life may increase at every moment by a new infusion of the grace of the active presence of Jesus in me; an infusion produced:

1. By each meritorious act (virtue, work, suffering under all its varying forms, such as privation of creatures, physical or moral pain, humiliation, self-denial; prayer, Mass, acts of devotion to Our Lady, etc.).

2. By the Sacraments especially the Eucharist.

It is certain, then (and here is a consequence that overwhelms me with its sublimity and its depth, but above all, fills me with courage and with joy), it is certain that, by every event, person or thing, Thou, Jesus, Thou Thyself, dost present Thyself, objectively, to me, at every instant of the day. Thou dost hide Thy wisdom and Thy love beneath these appearances and dost request my co-operation to increase Thy life in myself.

O my soul, at every instant Jesus presents Himself to you by the GRACE OF THE PRESENT MOMENT—every time there is a prayer to say, a Mass to celebrate or to hear, reading to be done, or acts of patience, of zeal, of renunciation, of struggle, confidence, or love to be produced. Would you dare look the other way, or try to avoid His gaze?

FIFTH TRUTH. The triple concupiscence caused by original sin and increased by every one of my actual sins establishes elements of death that militate against the life of Jesus in me. Now in exact proportion as these elements develop in me, they diminish the exercise of that life. Alas! They may even go so far as to destroy it outright.

In case you do not know what triple concupiscence is, this term means that since Adam's sin, we all have a weakness and tendency towards sin in three ways. These are the desire for things of the earth, such as worldly status, money, and so on connected to the sin of greed; the preoccupation and seeking of the pleasures of the senses, such as falling into the sins of lust and gluttony; and the gross overexertion of our free will, self-will and rebellion, even when we choose something unreasonable.

The harmony found in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, "original justice", as the CCC notes, was marred forever through Original Sin.

Nevertheless, inclinations and feelings contrary to that life, and temptations, even violent and prolonged can do it no harm whatever as long as my will resists them. And then (what a consoling truth!) like any other elements in the spiritual combat, they serve only to augment that life, in proportion to my own zeal.

SIXTH TRUTH. If I am not faithful in the use of certain means, my intelligence will become blind and my will too weak to co-operate with Jesus in the increase, or even in the maintenance of His life in me. And the result will be a progressive diminution of that life: I shall find myself slipping into tepidity of the will.

In the long perfection series, I have written about this clouding of the intellect and loss of discernment.

This tepidity is clearly distinct from the dryness and even disgust which fervent souls experience in spite of themselves. For in that case, no sooner are the venial faults that escape us, through weakness committed, than we fight back, and detest them, and consequently show no evidence of tepidity of the will.

Asking for the grace to see one's venial sins immediately forms a good prayer and creates a habit of instant reflection.

But the soul that is poisoned with this kind of tepidity manifests two opposing wills: one good, the other bad. One hot, the other cold. On one hand, it wants salvation, and therefore it avoids evident mortal sin; on the other hand it does not want what is demanded by the love of God. On the contrary, it wants all the comforts of a free and easy life, and that is why it allows itself to commit deliberate venial sins.

God does not want any of us to be sinning in a venial decision. The deliberate ones need to go, and then, the Holy Spirit begins working on the knee-jerk, automatic ones, which are the hardest to fight.

When this tepidity is not resisted, the very fact goes to show that there is in the soul a partial, though not total, bad will. That is to say, one part of the will says to God: “On such and such a point I do not want to cease displeasing You.” (Father Desurmount, C.SS.R., Retour Continuel a Dieu.)

Through dissipation, cowardice, self-delusion, or blindness, I tend to compromise with venial sin. But therefore my whole salvation is in danger, since I am paving the way to mortal sin.

Self-delusion may be connected to pride, and in the Dark Night, God chips away at this sin.

Were I to have the misfortune to fall into this tepidity (and a fortiori if I were to go lower still), I would have to make every effort to get out of it. 1) I would have to revive the fear of God in my soul by imagining myself, as vividly as possible, face to face with my last end, with death, with the judgment of God, with hell, eternity, sin, and so forth. 2) And to revive compunction by the sweet science of Thy wounds, O my merciful Redeemer. Going, in spirit, to Calvary, I would throw myself down at Thy holy feet and let Thy living Blood run down upon my head and heart to wash away my blindness, melt the ice in my soul, and drive away the torpor of my will.

Meditating on the Four Last Things helps tremendously.

SEVENTH TRUTH. I must seriously fear that I do not have the degree of interior life that Jesus demands of me:

I cannot emphasize the importance of this section enough. 

1.If I cease to increase my thirst to live in Jesus, that thirst which gives me both the desire to please God in all things, and the fear of displeasing Him in any way whatever. But I necessarily cease to increase this thirst if I no longer make use of the means for doing so: morning mental-prayer, Mass, Sacraments, and Office, general and particular examinations of conscience, and spiritual reading; or if, while not altogether abandoning them, I draw no profit from them, through my own fault.

2.If I do not have that minimum of recollection which will allow me, during my work, to watch over my heart and keep it pure and generous enough not to silence the voice of Our Lord when He warns me of the elements of death, as soon as they show themselves, and urges me to fight them. Now I cannot possibly retain this minimum if I make no use of the means that will secure it: liturgical life, aspirations, especially in the form of supplication, spiritual communion, practice of the presence of God, and so on.

A minimum of recollection must become a habit. and, again, asking God for the grace of the instant recognition of sin. The next paragraph should put fear into one's heart and mind, as it is so easy to be trapped in self-delusion. 

Without this, my life will soon be crawling with venial sins, perhaps without my being aware of it, self-delusion will throw up the smoke screen of a seeming piety that is more speculative than practical, or of my ambition for good works, to hide this state from me, or even to conceal a condition more appalling still! And yet my blindness will be imputed to me as sin since, by failing to foster the recollection indispensable to it, I shall have fomented and encouraged its very cause.

EIGHTH TRUTH. My interior life will be no better than my custody of my heart. “Before all things keep a guard over thy heart, for from it springs forth life.”

Omni custodia serva cor tuum, quia ex ipso vita procedit (Prov. 4:23).

How true this is....where you heart is so is your treasure. Is it food, money, status, another person? Again, pray to God and you guardian angel to show you the truth of habitual idolatry; even if it seems relatively unimportant--anything can become an idol.

This custody of the heart is simply a HABITUAL or at least frequent anxiety to preserve all my acts, as they arise, from everything that might spoil their motive or their execution.

It is a peaceful, unexcited anxiety, without any trace of strain, yet powerful because it is based on childlike confidence in God.

It is the work of the heart and the will, rather than of the mind, which has to remain free to carry out its duties. Far from being an impediment to activity, the custody of the heart perfects it, by ordering it to the Spirit of God, and adjusting it to the duties of our state of life.

Now, this may confuse some of my regular readers, who have read many posts on the heart-head dilemma. We can always turn to reason for help against inordinate desires, or even too strong of a love. Our reason must control, always, the heart, contrary to popular songs, writings, even some sermons. Once we have purity of heart, we can trust the desires, and we then can discern what is from God and what is not from God, but from ourselves.

It is an exercise that can be carried on at any hour. It is a quick glance, from the heart, over present actions and a peaceful attention to all the various phases of an action, as we perform it. It is carrying out exactly the precept, “Age quod agis.” The soul, like an alert sentry, keeps watch over every movement of its heart, over everything that is going on within it: all its impressions, intentions, passions, inclinations; in a word, all its interior and exterior acts, all its thoughts, words, and deeds.

Custody of the heart demands a certain amount of recollection: there is no place for it in a soul given to dissipation.

I recollect during conversations, in Church, in a car, like Sam-I -Am, reflecting everywhere. This becomes a constant habit if one prays for the grace and cooperates with that grace.

A paraphrase:  Would you reflect with a mouse? Would you reflect in a house? Would you reflect in a box? Would you reflect with a fox? Would you? Could you? In a car? And so forth.....

By frequently following this practice, we will gradually acquire the habit of it.

Quo vadam et ad quid? Where am I going and why? What would Jesus do? How would He act in my place? What advice would He give me? What does He want from me, at this moment? Such are the questions that spring up spontaneously in the soul that is hungry for interior life.

This works.

For the soul that goes to Jesus through Mary, this custody of the heart takes on a still more affectionate quality, and recourse to this dear Mother becomes a continual need for his heart.

NINTH TRUTH. Jesus Christ reigns in a soul that aspires to imitate Him seriously, wholly, lovingly. This imitation has two degrees: 1) The soul strives to become indifferent to creatures, considered in themselves whether they suit its tastes or not. Following the example of Jesus, it seeks no other rule, in this, but the will of God: “I came down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of Him that sent me.”

Descendi de coelo non ut faciam voluntatem meam sed ejus qui misit me (Joan. 6:38).

Complete objectivity, complete detachment...

2) The soul shows more readiness in doing things that are contrary to its nature, and repugnant to it. And thus it carries out the agendo contra that St. Ignatius speaks of in his famous meditation on the reign of Christ. It is acting against natural inclination in order to tend, by preference, to what imitates the poverty of the Savior, and His love for sufferings and humiliations. “For Christ did not please Himself.”

Christus non sibi placuit (Rom. 15:3).

This is huge...we all need to stop pleasing ourselves and concentrate on pleasing God alone. Especially, because of recent events, this has become extremely important.

Following the expression of St. Paul, the soul then truly knows our Lord: “You have learned Christ.”

Didicistis Christum (Eph. 4:20).

In this next paragraph, Father describes the Illuminative State perfectly.

TENTH TRUTH. No matter what my condition may be, if I am only willing to pray and become faithful to grace, Jesus offers me every means of returning to an inner life that will restore to me my intimacy with Him, and will enable me to develop His life in myself. And then, as this life gains ground within me, my soul will not cease to possess joy, even in the thick of trials, and the words of Isaias will be fulfilled in me: “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy health shall speedily arise, and thy justice shall go before thy face, and the glory of the Lord shall gather thee up. Thou shalt call, and the Lord shall hear, thou shalt cry and He shall say:

‘Here I am.’ And the Lord will give thee rest continually, and will fill thy soul with brightness and will deliver thy bones, and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a fountain of water whose waters do not fail.”

Is. 58:8, 9, 11.

ELEVENTH TRUTH. If God calls me to apply my activity not only to my own sanctification, but also to good works, I must establish this firm conviction, before everything else, in my mind: Jesus has got to be, and wishes to be, the life of these works.

My efforts, by themselves, are nothing, absolutely nothing. “Without Me you can do nothing.”

Sine me nihil potestis facere (Joan. 15:5).

They will only be useful, and blessed by God, if by means of a genuine interior life I unite them constantly to the life-giving action of Jesus. But then they will become all-powerful: “I can do all things in Him who strengtheneth me.”

Again, look at the many posts on humility and merit. Good works follow the workings of perfection.

Omnia possum in eo qui me confortat (Phil. 4:13).

But should they spring from pride and self-satisfaction, from confidence in my own talents, from the desire to shine, they will be rejected by God: for would it not be a sacrilegious madness for me to steal, from God, a little of His glory in order to decorate and beautify myself?

Daily, one must demand from one's self truth. 

This conviction, far from robbing me of all initiative, will be my strength. And it will make me really feel the need to pray that I may obtain humility, which is such a treasure for my soul, since it is a guarantee of God’s help and of success in my labors.

Key is humility. More comments here later....am off to a busybakson.

Once I am really convinced of the importance of this principle, I will make a serious examination of myself, when I am on retreat, to find out: 1) if my conviction of the nothingness of my own activity, left to itself, and of its power when united to that of Jesus, is not getting a little tarnished; 2) if I am ruthless in stamping out all self-satisfaction and vanity, all self-admiration in my apostolate; 3) if I continue unwaveringly to distrust myself; 4) and if I am praying to God to preserve me from pride, which is the first and foremost obstacle to His assistance.

This Credo of the interior life, once it has become for my soul the whole foundation of its existence, guarantees to it, even here below, a participation in the joys of heaven.

The interior life is the life of the elect.

It fits in with the end God had in view when He created us.

Ad contemplandum quippe Creatorem suum homo conditus fuerat ut ejus speciem quaereret atque in soliditate amoris illius habitaret (St. Gregory the Great, Moralia, viii, 12).

It answers the end of the Incarnation: “God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we may live by Him.”

Filium suum unigenitum Deus misit in mundum ut vivamus per eum (1 Joan. 4:9).

It is a state of complete happiness: “The end of human creatures is union with God; and in this their happiness consists.”

Finis humanae creaturae est adhaerere Deo: in hoc enim felicitas ejus consistit (St. Thomas Aquinas).

In this happiness, if thorns are seen from the outside, yet roses bloom within: but with the joys of the world it is just the reverse. “How pitiable they are, the poor people out in the world,” the Cure of Ars used to say, “they wear, over their shoulders, a mantle lined with thorns; they cannot make a move without being pierced. But true Christians have a mantle lined with soft fur.” Crucem vident, unuctionem non vident.

They see the cross, but do not see the consolations. (Said by St. Bernard, of those who took scandal at the austerity of the Cistercian life).

Heavenly state! The soul becomes a living heaven.

Semper memineris Dei, et coelum mens tua evadit. (St. Ephrem). Ever be mindful of God, and your mind will become His heaven.

Mens animae paradisus est, in qua, dum coelestia meditatur quasi in paradiso voluptatis delectatur (Hugh of St. Victor). The mind is the paradise of the soul, wherein, while it meditates upon heavenly things, it rejoices as though in a paradise of delights.

Then, like St. Margaret Mary, it can sing:

Je possède en tout temps et je porte en tout lieu
Et le Dieu de mon coeur et le Coeur de mon Dieu.

(I ever possess, and take with me everywhere, the God of my heart and the Heart of my God.) It is the beginning of eternal bliss, Inchoatio quaedam beatitudinis.

St. Thomas Aquinas. 2a 2ae, q. 180, a. 4.

Grace is the seed of Heaven.