> [[jpc-abandonment-toc|← Previous]] | [[jpc-abandonment-toc|TOC]] | [[jpc-abandonment-02|Next →]] # Foreword No mere human is strong enough to live the Christian life. But, of course, Jesus is, and he lives to share his power with anyone willing to follow him. As such, every human life teeters between God and self. As each of our lives unfolds from adolescence into adulthood, we come to realize that we can either establish our own selves as sole masters of our lives, or allow ourselves to be led by another. That is, we must all answer to someone. We must follow some standard of what we consider to be real, loving, beautiful; and this measure will either be ourselves or another. Each, in his own way and in his own time, comes to understand what the Lord referred to cryptically when exhorting us to take his yoke upon our shoulders: "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light" (Mt 11:29--30). The creator of the human heart knows there is no such thing as a "yokeless" life. The choice each of us faces is not, "Should I place a yoke upon myself or not?", but rather, "Under whose yoke am I going to live? Whom shall I serve?" Here all Christian masterpieces converge, at the battle between ruling ourselves or serving Christ. At the top of any list of classics treating such spiritual warfare must be the Jesuit father Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675 ---1751) and his *L'Abandon à la Providence Divine*, best known in English as, *Abandonment to Divine Providence*. This work is actually a collection of conferences and retreat notes given to the Sisters of the Visitation in Nancy, France when Fr. de Caussade was chaplain there from 1733 ---1740. In his years shepherding the sisters and those from the area who would come to him for direction, Fr. de Caussade never tired of emphasizing how we must trust God enough to hand ourselves over to him continuously and completely in the most concrete circumstances of our lives. Inevitably, de Caussade's masterpiece reflects much of what had been transpiring in the Church, especially in France, during the tumultuous years following the Protestant Reformation. After the Reformation, two schools of spirituality came to dominate in France: Jansenism, named after the very influential Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen (d. 1648), and Quietism, so called after its founder Miguel de Molinos' (d. 1697) insistence that the spiritually advanced could leave behind both God's commandments as well as the desires of their own hearts. Consequently, France became home to both the pessimism of Jansenism with its stress on original sin, utter human depravity, and the absolute need for divine grace, on the one hand, and Quietism on the other, emphasizing the possibility of perfection in this life with the result that select holy ones can actually rise above the need to pray, any dependence upon the Church, the sacraments, and the Magisterium. While both schools were condemned quickly, they lingered in various forms for centuries. Due to the confusion left by their wakes of extremism, de Caussade's superiors prudently waited well over a century to release his writings, perhaps fearing his call to seek God's will actively and ardently might smack of Jansenism, while his insistence on total abandonment could echo traces of Quietism. Upon entering the Jesuit novitiate in Toulouse back in 1693, one of the first things de Caussade would have learned was the "Principle and Foundation" of St. Ignatius of Loyola, with which the great saint opened his *Spiritual Exercises*: > Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God Our Lord, and by > doing so, to save his soul. All other things on the face of the earth > are created for man in order to help him pursue the end for which he > is created. It follows from this that he must use other created > things, in so far as they help towards his end, and free himself from > them, in so far as they are obstacles to his end. To do this, we need > to make ourselves indifferent to all created things. . . . Thus, as > far as we are concerned, we should not want health more than illness, > wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more > than a short one, and the same for all the rest, but we should desire > and choose only what helps us more towards the end for which we are > created (§23). Steeped in such a vision of God and the world, de Caussade understood early on that the only way to realize the great purpose of human living was to see God's will in *all things* "on the face of the earth" and thus to embrace them for the sole purpose of glorifying their benevolent Creator. Such a spirituality is very "world friendly" in that God is never relegated to ceremony or religious piety but is found in and through the definite demands of every Christian life. As de Caussade himself would hold: "If we could lift the veil, and if we were attentive and watchful, God would continually reveal himself to us, and we should see his divine action in everything that happened to us, and rejoice in it. At each successive occurrence we should exclaim: 'It is the Lord', and we should accept every fresh circumstance as a gift of God."^1^ In 1861 Fr. Henri Ramière, S.J. (a prolific editor, as well as the founder of what we today know as the *Messenger of the Sacred Heart*) was handed all of de Caussade's writings, consisting mainly of brief reflections and instructions on self-abandonment to God's will. Fr. Ramière pieced together today's version of the *Abandonment to Divine Providence*, sometimes rendered in English, *The Sacrament of the Present Moment*, due to a cherished sentiment and image running through these meditations. Since its release in 1861, there have been numerous editions, each with various ways to refer to the books and chapters, and not much agreement on how de Caussade himself would have wanted his notes presented. Yet what remains consistent are the three central principles Fr. Ramière put forward in his introduction summarizing de Caussade's theology of abandonment: (1) nothing occurs in one's life that God did not either directly cause or lovingly permit; (2) God causes or wills nothing that is not for the greater glory of his Son Jesus and for all his saints; (3) so, as long as one lives, God is laboring so as to be glorified through our joyful cooperation. Ultimately, *Abandonment* therefore seeks to teach Christians how to discern God's ever-active will in their lives, to sense the movements of their own hearts so as to become more amenable to the promptings of the Holy Spirit throughout the day. Throughout these pages the reader is invited to see how God's will is always good and loving and that every circumstance in one's life can be seen somehow as an invitation to greater union with the Most Holy Trinity. By conforming more to God's will, Christians become more configured to Christ, and when that happens we take on the mind and heart of Jesus himself. This in fact is the goal of total self-surrender, to imitate the pattern of Christ's emptying^2^ because while Jesus is clearly the "supreme expression" of abandonment to our loving Father, it remains for us to continue this surrender: "Each saint receives a share in this divine life, and in each, Jesus Christ is different, although the same in himself. The life of each saint is the life of Jesus Christ; it is a new gospel."^3^ In this way God pieces together a Church not made of stones but of living saints, continuing his Son's life on earth by adding more and more members to his Mystical Body (cf. Eph 1:19--22). Doing God's will at every moment, de Caussade envisions, is like "an imperceptible stitch added to the work, and yet with these stitches God performs wonders of which he sometimes allows a glimpse to be seen."^4^ There is no act too small, no stitch too insignificant, no flower too unnoticed in the life of the baptized; nothing is too unimportant for God to use to save others on earth and to bring greater glory to heaven. Now is a fitting time to take up de Caussade anew. His presentation of the Christian life outlined in the following pages is really the spirituality of today's Church. The Council Fathers at Vatican II sensed how the Holy Spirit was encouraging the Church to reemphasize the call to holiness for all Christians (cf. *Lumen Gentium* §5). The fullness of sanctity is not simply for clerics and consecrated, but rather all the baptized are called to surrender their lives, their work, their free time and recreation, their families, finances, and all their endeavors over to God. Vatican II wanted to recover the dangers of "over-spiritualizing" the spiritual life, reminding all that God's grace comes to us through the ordinary moments of our lives and through the mundane pursuits he has placed before us. This is what de Caussade means when he writes how, "Everything is precious in their eyes, everything enriches them. They are inexpressibly indifferent toward all things, and yet neglect nothing, having a respect for, and making use of all things."^5^ We receive all from God but then we actively unite our wills to his in those very tangible realities of our lives, knowing that while we may not always enjoy or agree with what is before us, in Christ all makes sense and in him we can finally begin to cease worrying about our lives, our food, our bodies and our clothes, knowing deeply how our Father is pleased to give us the kingdom (cf. Lk 12:22--32). Such filial trust is key to understanding the following pages. God is our Father and he delights in his children who try to please him by living like his only-begotten Son, Jesus. Mary did this perfectly and through her maternal care God draws us into his own light and joy. "Your children have only to love you without ceasing, and to fulfill their small duties like children. A child on its mother's lap is occupied only with its games as if it had nothing else to do but to play with its mother."^6^ As we move from accepting God's "permissible will" (that all happens out of his providential care) to more actively embracing his "expressed will" (by seeking to live out the commandments of scripture and the teachings of the Church), we grow in childlike trust and joyful innocence. The incessant anxiety and stress of contemporary society begins to fade and the otherwise unnoticed pieces of our lives can start to make sense. Yet de Caussade is never Pollyannaish: he knows many things in our lives may still cause sorrow and pain, but once freely placed in the Father's hands, they open our hearts to receive more of God's tenderness and care. For, when offered to him, there is nothing in our lives that goes unused. So, with Jean-Pierre de Caussade, we are about to embark on the great paradox: the more we abandon ourselves to the one in whose image we are created, the freer and the more alive we become. As the Son of God came to teach us, the more we allow ourselves to be a gift to God and others, the less enslaved we become. For only in Christ is true freedom realized as service, death as life, and acceptance as abandonment. ---Fr. David Vincent Meconi, S.J.\ Saint Louis University\ May 2011 --- ![[maps/bibliography#^biblio-adp]] > [[jpc-abandonment-toc|← Previous]] | [[jpc-abandonment-toc|TOC]] | [[jpc-abandonment-02|Next →]]