Abandon Your Fantasies All Ye Who Enter Here

You seek for God, beloved soul, and He is everywhere, everything speaks of Him, everything offers Him to you, He walks beside you, He surrounds you and is within you.  He lives with you and yet you try to find Him.  You seek your own idea of God, although you have Him in His reality.  You seek perfection and you meet it in all that happens to you.  All you suffer, all you do, all your inclinations are mysteries under which God gives Himself to you while you are vainly straining after high-blown fancies.  God will never come to dwell with you clothed in these imaginings.

~*~

Those words from Abandonment to Divine Providence always strike me particularly, as do many passages therein.  It seems there is little to add by way of commentary, for de Caussade speaks so clearly and directly in this beautiful and mystical passage.

Perhaps in his mysticism, de Caussade speaks more to our hearts than our heads.  If so, then we must let go of our need to analyze, our desperation to know absolutely clearly, and our efforts to dissect reality into neat little labeled boxes.  Instead we must open our hearts to the presence of God who dwells within us, the presence of God who comes to us in a simple wafer of bread transubstantiated, and the Holy Spirit who whispers to us in the secret of our hearts.

In my spiritual journey, I have seen how our Lord has led me to draw nearer to Himself and to let go of all my false conceptions of who He is again and again, stripping away the layers of fantasy and bringing me back to the great and glorious reality.  Although that reality is less neat and perfect than my desires, it is ever so much more powerful and awe-inspiring.  His working truly amazes me when I can open my heart to see what my eyes cannot.