A further great grace is to feel neither trouble nor fear, nor anxiety, whether about your present state or about the future, as though you had become insensible to all things. For that is the fruit and the happy effect of your complete self-abandonment. As you have abandoned all to God, he takes all in his care, driving from your soul all trouble, fear, and anxiety. He deprives it of all sensibility to its own interests, leaving it sensible only to himself. This condition is the firm foundation of the completest security a soul can enjoy: this life has no greater happiness nor any surer sign of God’s goodwill.
Divine goodness does not refuse to grant you from time to time a few crumbs of consolation and of strength to help your weakness in those deserts which that goodness forces you to pass through.
You must not be surprised that your interior troubles have no effect upon your behavior towards your neighbor and that they do not diminish your patient equanimity or your kindheartedness during spiritual ordeals. Moreover, it is during spiritual ordeals that we are possibly more fit to help, console, relieve, and serve others.
Fr Jean-Pierre de Caussade, (d1751)
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