A Pocket Retreat for Catholics: Thirty Steps to Holiness in Just Ten Minutes a Day by Maucourant F

Author:Maucourant, F. [Maucourant, F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

All your actions can unite you with Jesus

Pious exercises are not an end; they are only a means. The real end is piety itself — i.e., the love of God and the search for Him. Many persons reverse this order of things and fall into a false piety; they soon become nothing more than what St. Francis de Sales called “statues and phantoms of devotion.” They neglect the duties of their state to prolong their prayers, assist at a grand ceremony, or hear a sermon; but they have no idea of how “to unite the care of the house of their soul with that of their exterior house, nor how to accommodate their pious exercises with their domestic duties.”

There is one means of compensation for those souls whose painful and absorbing duties and the requirements of their state prevent from prolonging or multiplying their pious exercises. There is the exercise of piety itself, which consists in performing all our duties in union with the will of God and offering them all to Him as an act of love.

“Everything you do is thus watered by the blessing of God,” St. Francis de Sales tells us. “And the more loving is your offering, the more perfection will you attain. Do as our Blessed Lady did in the days of our Savior’s infancy, when she worked with one hand and held her sweet little Baby with the other.” Everything that is done as a duty of our state, everything that is necessary, everything that the divine will has imposed upon our will, becomes a real exercise of piety. “We can be saints everywhere, if we really wish to be saints,” says St. Claude de la Colombière. Everywhere and in everything, if a person desires to seek, to see, to love, and to serve Jesus, he is exercising piety, whether he commands or obeys.

“No company and no difficulties can hinder our souls from being with Jesus, and with His angels and saints,” says St. Francis de Sales. The devout soul knows, in the midst of all distractions, how to unite himself with his divine Master by an act of love, “like the pilgrim who takes a little wine, without stopping on his journey, simply that he may be strengthened to continue it.”

Aspirations also embalm the soul, like a few grains of incense, burning every hour, that perfume the sanctuary; these prayers also make the soul, in the words of Origen, “a permanent altar where the sacrifice is perpetuated night and day.”

It is true piety, amiable and apostolic, “that leaves God sometimes to make itself agreeable to its neighbor for the love of God,” says St. Francis de Sales. In certain situations, it is better “that we should try to find God in all that we do,” and “our duty is to regulate as well as possible the different things that are the objects of our occupation and our care,” St. Ignatius tells us.

St. Margaret Mary prayed while taking care of the little ass belonging to the convent and while preparing the vegetables.

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