It must be divine action that animates me

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Divine action upon the soul must take first place above all other things within and around us that would help us to respond to God. He is the designer and the maintainer of the soul.

This is what I take away from this somewhat difficult section. (And we are only on Page 11!) Father C instills a mistrust of everything that comprises the “self,” and demands that we self-empty in order that God can then work unimpeded in us and through us.

My capacity to misunderstand God is immense and should never be under-estimated. Because the spiritual life is one of impressions and suggestions and presences that are difficult to detect, one’s spirituality can simply become a mess – a psychic or psychological hodge-podge of a child’s thoughts about the adult world. One must never forget how wispy one is. How easily the merest puff of air might shift my direction or my thinking or my obeying in the slightest, unremarkable way, and yet impel me that much off course.

I must have God in my life, and I must have him in full control of all of its movements, so that his action – the divine action – is that which animates me.

Does this mean the call of the Christian is one to abject passivity? That could well be the accusation here. It is not abject passivity for a son to allow his father to instruct him, or for a student to allow a teacher to teach him, or for a coach to train him. There is a very active permission that is constantly being offered by the follower of God to allow for divine action to empower the believer to address himself to the moment in a way that is consistent with the will of God, whether it is to do, or to endure.

The importance of self-emptying is a mark of the more mystical teachings in the faith, which I, by the way, embrace. Here, Father C has taken a page from John of the Cross, who tells us to leave off everything in us that is not God in order to move further toward God. We cannot ascend the mountain if laden with the heavy materials of self-trust: “To love is to labor, to detach and strip oneself for God’s sake of all that is not God.” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, 13:6)

In fact, in his “Method for Interior Direction,” Page 440, Caussade virtually steals from the pages of the Spanish saint:

_{“The more we banish from ourselves all that is not god, the more we shall be filled with god.”}

So we are helped to make some sense of this elusive quality of the Christian life by, at the very least, this comment:

_{“Divine action … can take possession of a soul only to the extent to which that soul is emptied of all trust in its own action, for such self-confidence is a spurious fullness that excludes divine action.” (Page 12)}

This is another way to say we are to cooperate with the grace of God and not rely on our own understanding.

The Gospels certainly show us that the disciples very often expected Jesus to do something in one way, while he accomplished his will by means outside the expectations of his followers.

They expected him to destroy the city that would not believe in him. “Shall we call down fire?” They expected him to send the crowd away from him so everyone could get something to eat, but he instead fed them. They expected him to be annoyed by the presence of children, but he welcomed them. Often we see them expecting a certain course of action to be taken by Jesus, and then find him doing something different. Peter expected a fight when the Roman soldiers came to arrest Jesus. Jesus, on the other hand, healed the wounded man’s ear (Malchus), told Peter to stand down, and then went quietly with his captors.

Father C is warning us against the same wrong-headed reaction here. God has said, “My ways are higher than your ways,” (Isaiah 55:9), but we still fight with this and lobby for God to act according to our plan. If I superimpose my plans on God, I place my ideas above his. I cram his will into mine. That is, indeed, “a spurious fullness.”