June 20th
St Chantal on Prayer
In His Good Pleasure

God wishes you to hold yourself in an extremely passive state.  Do not examine yourself in order to learn if you are to persevere, if you are being faithful, if you are pleasing to God.  Empty yourself of your very self and of every anxiety, apprehension, trouble, or fear as to how long this state will last, this state in which everything causes you fear and brings you trouble.  Your remedy will be a simple gazing upon God, with no attempt to reply to Him.  Once more, in God's name I tell you this.  You look into yourself far too much.  Do not any longer find cause for trouble in your trouble.  Never speak of it, neither to God nor to yourself, nor ever so much as look at it for long enough to be able to find words, to describe it, nor express it to anybody whatever; and never make it the subject of any examine.  Hide your grief from your very self, and hold your eyes on God as if you did not feel it and, if you can speak to Him at all, let it be about Himself and not about your difficulties.  Keep your eyes raised to heaven, and be content to repeat over and over with a smile filled with confidence:  O eternity!  O eternity!

Remain subject to the good pleasure of the will of God who is making you poor, by depriving you of any sort of inward contentment.  For He has entirely removed from you the awareness of the gifts placed in you by His grace, these gifts which His mercy has so infused into your soul that they may no longer be separated from your interior life.  But the divine Guide, in order to make you climb to a still higher sanctity, has taken your faith, hope and love for His divine goodness, your trust, the abandonment and security which you felt in Him and all the interior powers of your soul.  All these precious gifts, which He himself had placed in you, He has cast into the crucible and fire of His purest and holiest love, so that He might consume away and annihilate in you any sort of pleasure or contentment or complacency -- I do not speak of the earthly kind, for this work is long since accomplished.  This Divine Master wishes to destroy in you the pleasure which you enjoy of finding in yourself all these gifts and graces which, by His mercy, He had granted to you.  And just as He has given them, so has He taken them away, that is, as regards your awareness of them, so that it might be He alone who will occupy your soul, and not His gifts.