by Jean Pierre de Caussade

While I find no trace of deliberate sin in your behavior, I do find a multitude of faults and imperfections which will do you much harm unless you attempt a drastic cure. These include anxieties, vain fears, dejection, weariness and discouragement that are half deliberate, or at least not sufficiently resisted, and that constantly disturb in you that interior peace upon the need for which I have been insisting.

What are you to do to prevent them? First, never cling to them voluntarily; secondly, neither endure nor resist them with violent effort since that merely strengthens them. Allow them to drop as a stone drops into water; think of other things. As St. Francis de Sales says, talk to God of other things; take shelter in your refuge -- the interior silence of respect and submission, of trust and complete self-abandonment.

How am I to behave, you may ask, if whether in this connection or in others, I commit faults, even voluntary faults? On such occasions you must recollect the counsel of St. Francis de Sales: neither be troubled that you are troubled, nor be anxious that you are anxious, nor be disturbed that you are disturbed, but turn naturally to God in sweet and peaceful humility, going so far as to thank him that he has not allowed you to commit still greater faults.

Such sweet and peaceful humility, joined to trust divine goodness, will calm and pacify you interiorly, and this is your greatest spiritual need at present.