by Jean de Caussade

No longer give way to the grief that arises from the difficulty you experience in concentrating your attention. Remember that the mere desire, if habitual, of recollection can serve in recollection's stead, and that we have only to be unfailing in our desire to think of God, please God, and obey God, in order to think of, please, and obey him indeed.

The greater your wish to learn to pray, you say, the less is your ability for prayer. That might well be because your wish is not accompanied by a sufficiently complete submission and purity of intention. Always go to prayer with the one desire to please God, and not to draw conscious delight from it. Go to it in a spirit of sacrifice and to get out of it all that should be pleasing to God. Realize, moreover, that recollection is like those things that escape our minds when we are over-anxious to remember them, but that return to us when we treat them with a certain passive indifference: this is the teaching of St Francis de Sales.

Never lose sight of that great precept that asserts that great spiritual poverty, known, felt and loved out of love of the abjection it brings, is one of the greatest treasures that a soul can possess in this world, since knowledge of it keeps the soul in deep humility. To believe, on the other hand, that you are lost because you make no discovery in yourself of clearly perceived faith and charity, and to be thereupon vexed, disquieted, or discouraged, is a dangerous illusion of self-love, that for ever longs to see all things clearly, and in all things to have reason for self-complacency. When we experience this temptation we must say to our selves: I have been, I am and I shall be all that shall please God; yet, intellectually and in the apex of my soul, I want to belong to him and serve him, whatever may be fall me in this world or the next.