Daily Thought For May 7, 2018

Remembering in Moments of Desolation

In the depth of our soul, there always remains the tendency to measure divine things by our human standard.

Hence, with each new revelation of our misery, our confusion increases, and we would gladly close our eyes in order not to see—just as certain sick people do not wish to know of their illness because they feel that not to know it is not to have it, as though the knowledge of one’s malady were not in itself the beginning of a serious cure.

For this reason souls become dismayed at temptations, desolations, aridities, faults—in a word, at everything that gives them the impression they are falling lower. They wish to ascend, because they desire to arrive at the summit, because they burn to be united with God. Therefore, in perceiving that they are apparently descending under the impact of temptations, the weight of their faults, and the void in their souls caused by desolations, they grow confused and grieve because they forget the divine paradoxes of the spiritual life.

Fortunately God does not always heed our protests and our cries of anguish. Instead he pours out upon us those precious graces, even though they may be bitter, which involve temptations, aridities, and even faults, as a mother, despite the wailing and the protests of her child, firmly applies the painful remedy that will give him health.

Someday we shall understand that among the greatest graces God has given us in our life are precisely those disconcerting ones which make us think that God is abandoning us, when, on the contrary, he is attracting us; those which cause us to judge that we are falling away from our ideal, when, on the contrary, we are drawing nearer to the sweet goal of our hopes.

O souls eager for perfection, do not weary of humbling yourselves. Have no fear of whatever plunges you into the depth of your misery!


Servant of God Archbishop Luis María Martínez

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