We have given up everything
- FATHER JEAN PIERRE DE CAUSSADE, S.J.
I cannot resist saying that the longer I live the more clearly I both perceive and understand that all depends upon God, and that we have but to make surrender of everything to him to be successful in everything.
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I have no sooner made the sacrifice to him than I find everything falls out as I would wish.
You do well to reflect that there are many others who bear a heavier cross than yourself. But remember that consciousness of its heaviness does not hinder us from being submissive to God. We can easily be deprived of a submission that is at once sensible and comforting, but we shall never be without that of pure faith and pure spirit. The latter is the more meritorious in that no vain complacency can spoil it. This is why to many, who allow their souls to cry out in humiliation beneath the weight of their afflictions, God grants only the second kind of submission.
God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb; we are always given special graces with which to endure extraordinary misfortunes. Patience make the unpreventable tolerable, to quote a pagan philosopher who had only human reason to enlighten him. Faith and religion, the sight of the cross and the prospect of eternal happiness, should surely make us think and say as much.
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Acknowledgement
Father Jean Pierre de Caussade, S.J. "We have given up everything." excerpt from The Joy of Full Surrender (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2008).
Reprinted with permission from Paraclete Press.
This excerpt appeared in Magnificat in May 2013.
The Author
Father Jean Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (1675-1751) was a French Jesuit priest and writer known for his work Abandonment to Divine Providence (also translated as The Joy of Full Surrender) and his posthumously-published letters of instruction to the Nuns of the Visitation at Nancy, Spiritual Letters of Jean-Pierre De Caussade, where he was spiritual director from 1733-1740. He also spent years as preacher in southern and central France, as a college rector (at Perpignan and at Albi), and as the director of theological students at the Jesuit house in Toulouse.
