The Much That Will Be Required

But a weak person will say:  "These bad thoughts take away my devotion, and they usually come to me when I approach devotion and good works.  Sometimes they make me feel like stopping the good that I have started so that I do not hear such things."

But the answer is clear.  This is the very thing that the demon went about looking for, even if he was circling around giving you a different kind of thoughts.  Instead of decreasing, you must rather increase in the good, as a person who acts deliberately to cause the demon to go out with a loss from a place where he thought that he would draw gain.

If you are lacking tenderness in devotion, do not be troubled, for our service is measured only by love.  Love does not consist in tender devotion but in a free offering and intention of  the will to do what God and his Church want us to do, and to suffer what he wills that we suffer, in order to please him.  If those who seem to have left what they have in t he world to serve God were also to leave the disordered desire for sweet feelings in the soul, they would live more happily than they do.  The devil would not find certain hairs of appetites by which to take hold of their heads and turn them about, thereby harming and even deceiving them.

Jesus Christ died naked on the cross; naked, we have to offer ourselves to him.  Our only clothing is to be doing his holy will according to the Commandments of God and of his Church, receiving with loving obedience whatever he wills to send us, no matter how hard.  Likewise, we are to receive from his hand temptation and consolation, and to give him thanks for the one and the other.

By Saint John of avila (+1569) was a Spanish priest, mystic, preacher and scholar: He is a Doctor of the Church.

Found in the Magnificat Monthly Vol. 20, No. 8 / October 2018 page 339.