Let Your Soul Be Carried Like a Toddler in His Mother's Arms

All the past weeks’ comments on the Garrigou-Lagrange book, Providence, fall under the series on perfection. One can see easily that if one trusts in God in good times and in bad, in health or illness, in success or failure, that one is exhibiting a great faith.

This is practical practice of the virtues of faith, hope, and love.

The author quotes Aquinas on “confidence”, which is steadfast hope, coming from faith.

Garrigou-Lagrange refers to the titles of Mary, who helps us in faith and hope: Mary, Help of Christians, Refuge of Sinners, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and one may add, Our Lady of Good Hope.

Faith and hope lead to love. If we, as the author notes, throw ourselves confidently into God’s Arms, placing our past and our future into His Hands, this is holiness united in love.

The theological virtues come into a fullness when one trusts in God.

“Love in its purest form, in fact, depends for its support upon the will of God…”

Therefore, a great act of love is expressed when we make God’s Will our own. We abandon ourselves to His “good pleasure”.

I especially like this next part, “For souls that follow this road, God is everything: eventually, they can say in very truth: ‘My God and my all’. God is their center; they find no peace but in Him, by submitting all their aspirations to His good pleasure and accepting tranquilly all that He does. At times of greatest difficulty St. Catherine of Siena would remember the Master’s words to her: ‘Think on Me and I will think of thee.’”.

I wish I had done this much earlier in my life, but it is never too late to submit in faith, in hope, and in love to the Will of God.

Here is a wonderful quotation from this chapter from St. Francis de Sales:

“Our Lord loves with a most tender love those who are so happy as to abandon themselves wholly to His fatherly care, letting themselves be governed by His divine providence, without any idle speculations as to whether the workings of this providence will be useful to their profit, or painful to their loss, and this because they are well assured that nothing can be sent, nothing permitted by this paternal and most loving heart, which will not be a source of good and profit to them. All that is required is that they should place all their confidence in Him….”

Using the example of a child or toddler being carried or not carried at will by the mother, the saint says this: “So this soul lets itself be carried when it lovingly accepts God’s good pleasure in all things that happen, and walks when it carefully effects all that the known (expressed) will of God demands.”