by Jean Pierre de Caussade

Be not wistful, my dear Sister, for the inclinations and the conscious delights God has given you and has now withdrawn from you. Many imperfections were present in the consolations you experienced in that spiritual state.

It is true that while these consolations were perceptible, they greatly gratified your nature whose desire is to see, recognize and experience them without intermission, yet the nearer this state is to the human, the farther it is from satisfying the need of divine love. Accordingly God is the quickest to withdraw them from a soul whom he sees to be faithful to grace.

The soul that ordeals have not enlightened and made free allows itself to drift, almost unaware, into new recourses to self. It builds its contentment and peace upon that least dependable of all things - the feelings. If it clings to God, it does so not for himself solely but much more for the consolation it expects of him. It cherishes a futile self-esteem based upon the spiritual riches it believes itself to possess, while only God can save it from falling into something like an idolatry of its imagined excellence.

When as a result of a complete change of your spiritual fortunes you see yourself reduce to nothingness, you find yourself suddenly stripped of vanity, presumption and every scarp of self-esteem, and possessed of humility, trust in God and love for him. Moreover your love is now altogether pure, since self-love's last perceptible prop has been taken from it with the result that it has nothing to cling to or corrupt. Thus I find your present state of poverty of more worth than your former fine experiences which, while they seemed so wholly pure to you, provided only so much secret and delightful food for your self-love.