The Power to Become Children of God

And the principal of these reasons was that he wished to teach us that, from the moment we give ourselves to God, we must put aside and trample under foot our own judgment, our own will, and our own strength; that we must go back to the smallness and the weakness and the foolishness of a little child; that all our past life must be blotted out, and that we must enter upon a new state of existence, a new life, of which God alone must be the principle.

And what is this new life?  It consists in a perfect dependence upon divine grace, in simplicity and obedience.  Let us look upon Jesus Christ in the crib; he adored his Father as perfectly there as upon the cross.  But his adoration was confined in his Sacred Heart; he said nothing, he did nothing, he was as it were annihilated; and it was in this very annihilation that the perfection of his adoration consisted.

Let us imagine this, let us dwell upon this, we who complain continually that we are before God as if we were brutes, without thoughts or words or actions.  This passive state, which is death to self-love, is incomparably more pleasing to God than anything, however sublime, which our mind or our heart or our mouth could express to him.  To be silent before God, to humble ourselves, to annihilate ourselves, to be in his presence as though we were not, this is to adore him perfectly in spirit and in truth.