Daily Thought For October 13, 2017

The Starting Point — Consenting To Our Poverty

     At the beginning…we are ready to make radical sacrifices.  We would like to leave everything, give everything.  But, very quickly, we discover that God always asks of us something that we had not thought of, sometimes even apparently insignificant things of which we are incapable of letting go.”
     We discover “all those secret attachments, those unconfessed refusals, those secret wounds.  We would have liked to leave everything, we were aspiring to freedom, and here we discover, with a sort of disillusionment that can sometimes lead to despair or turn into cynicism, that we are caught in our own trap…following Jesus, leaving everything for him, is beyond our capacity. We then realize that, despite all our efforts and our good resolutions, in fact we have not yet really begun!”
     “But paradoxically, this realization of our resistance, our inability to respond to his call, is perhaps, in reality, the most precious fruit…For when we have consented to our own poverty, then God can finally begin to work within us.”  

(Dom Jean-Charles Nault, O.S.B., September Magnificat, p. 304-305.