Tidbits From An Old Master

Ever since I found one of his books at a library sale, I have enjoyed and benefited from the writings of Abbe de Tourville. His slender volume, Letters of Direction, is a book I frequently use in my lectio divina. Here are some passages from that book that I think my readers might enjoy and from which you might gain nourishment:

Let us be able to depend quietly on ourselves. Let us judge for ourselves which things most help, guide, and teach us, by observing the degree in which they fit our own particular temperament; learning by experience those things which help us and which we most need.

Live according to your own nature; inwardly without restriction; outwardly in so far as external conditions permit.

One of the hardest things is to follow our own particular line of development, side by side with souls who have quite a different one; often one opposed to our own. It is natural for youth to hesitate between an attitude which it fears may be presumptuous and a candid admission of inferiority to everything around it. But this hesitation must cease or we will never grow up.

Still less must we look for approval and appreciation as a sign that we are on the right path.

We must therefore free ourselves absolutely of this anxious desire to be at one with other souls, however virtuous or wise they may be; just as we must never expect them to see things through our eyes. We must follow our own light as though we were alone in the world, save as regards to charity to others. In purely private matters, we must never be deflected from our own path.’

Therefore leave your soul to pray as suits it best, in its own way, without strain. Allow it most of the time to remain quiet, still. In a word, follow your bent.

For nothing is more individual to each soul than the form of its intimacy with our Lord. His earthly life revealed also that no two were intimate with Him in the same sort of way.

Observe the path you take instinctively at those times when you are most keenly aware of the real and intimate presence of our Lord. Realize that there lies your own particular grace.

We must follow our own path and not worry about the puddles into which we fall. The journey itself repairs the accidents into which it has led us. Tidy and timid travellers are never good travellers.

Between the extremes of foolhardiness and timidity, boldness is true wisdom.

A perfect childlike simplicity puts us at once into intimate relationship with God, without any hindrance. Let us try more and more to maintain in the depths of our souls the childlike simplicity and artlessness which our Lord asks and commands.

From every point of view we gain infinitely more by looking at our Lord, than by looking at ourselves. We shake off our faults more quickly and effectively when we adore our Lord than when we examine and criticize ourselves.

The soul gains very little from looking at itself. Such an occupation gives rise only to discouragement, preoccupation, distress, uncertainty, and illusion.

God asks only one thing—that you should be on close and friendly terms with Him, without fear; without ceremony.

Our Lord is our true and chief Director, who, without our knowledge, has arranged matters in such a way that our lives turn out quite differently from what we should have expected; infinitely better for our salvation and glory than we should ever have dared to hope.

Be bold enough always to believe that God is on your side and wholly yours, whatever you may think of yourself.

Think of this and say to yourself ‘I am loved by God more than I can either conceive or understand.’

Rejoice that you are what you are; for our Lord loves you very dearly. He loves the whole of you, just as you are.

Remember that it is our souls which are God’s joy; not on account of what they do for Him, but on account of what He does for them. All that He asks of them is to gladly accept his kindness, his generosity, his tolerance, his fatherly love.

Do not worry any more about what you are or are not. You are the object of His mercy. Be satisfied with that and think only of that.

The Mystery of grace which works in us is in a sense a copy of the Mystery of the Incarnation. By grace Jesus takes possession of our personality and fills it with His Divinity. He desires to make use of us by grace as he made use of His own nature in the Incarnation.

The intimacy of the soul with our Lord provides our true nourishment, our true home, however much circumstances change.

The root of many of our troubles is the desire to have only good inclinations. That is neither necessary nor possible. In countless ways we shall always feel ourselves to be wicked, unstable and unreasonable. We must realize that this is our nature and not our real personality; not our true, deliberate and voluntary desire; not the goal of our efforts. [Rom 7]

Far from your defects being charged against your soul and conscience, they are, before God, your defense, your justification and your glory.

What you need to realize is that a good state of soul can, in this world, go hand in hand with a feeling of deep inward disharmony, of confusion and cloudiness.

Do not fear things too much, for we often suffer more from the things we fear than from those which really come to pass. And what good does it do, seeing that when evils come, they bring with them strength to enable us to accept them; a strength which we do not have in advance.

It is not right to groan over the state of the world as if it were lost. What is actually happening is a clash between the old spirit and the new, a clash which is specially noticeable because the old spirit is realizing how old it is and how nothing is looked at any longer from its point of view. It is a great struggle of which the issue is never in doubt, a struggle in which that which is coming triumphs over that which has been.

Most people are like sheep and follow, without much satisfaction to themselves, the lines of the past tradition. A very small minority emerges, with great hesitation and amidst endless discussion to be faced by troublesome and pressing contradictions. It is however of that minority that you must be, when God has put you there by interior vocation and natural aptitude.

We live in a time of transition in which many things separate the present and above all the future, from the past. Such times are always difficult, but we rejoice when we see the light dawning beyond the clouds, clouds which have been piled up by ways of speaking, ways of judging, ways of acting, which are no longer those which the need of souls imperiously demands.

If shadows cross your mind on matters of faith, it is because all this has been so little taught in relation to our actual needs that we cannot always see our way. In this century everything has to be remade, even that which does not change in itself. Take nature, for instance. Has it changed? And yet you see in your chemistry and physics how the manner of knowing it has changed. Methods have improved and the same things are seen more clearly. That is precisely what is needed in matters of faith.

The absorbing interest of the present day is that the world is growing itself a new skin. We realize that the heavy mantle of the past, of all those things which no longer have any meaning for our minds, is slipping irrevocably away and leaving our souls free. The horizon broadens and lights up instead of closing down upon itself and becoming more and more obscure. I want this to be your attitude. I find that it brings peace and serenity to all those whom I am able to persuade of its truth. The horizon broadens and lights up instead of closing down upon itself and becoming more and more obscure.

How beautiful is the ordering of the social world and how valuable its knowledge – as infinite as the stellar universe, as ordinary as the lighting of a fire.

Come! Come! We must wake up and try to be that which we are reasonably meant to be and not that which other people have been. One does not become holy by copying others but by making good use of what is truly part of oneself. In a word, follow your bent, your need of quiet or of doing nothing according to what seems most natural to you at the time.

[I am typing the following passages from the chapter “Our Relationships with Others: Education” and taking them to heart as both a veteran home school mom and a classroom teacher. They are really good for all of us who desire to help others spiritually in any kind of ministry. We are not here to control others or make them conform to our own agenda, but to help prepare them for the future.]

Set aside everything which might make you at all touchy or timid and let all your qualities of goodwill, frankness and simplicity shine forth in your dealings with every one you meet. Never mind how different their characters and way of life may be, for our Lord desires us to behave thus even to the unrighteous which would otherwise be difficult.

Encourage with discretion all that is good in your pupils; let them feel your support without being embarrassed or hampered by it. Education, as the very word shows, means helping someone to develop himself, to draw out all that is good in him. It is the greatest of all benefits. That too is the meaning of the expression to direct¸ direction. Unless interpreted in this sense, I like the word formation less; it seems to me to carry the suggestion of a preconceived form into which one is to force people whether they like it or not. But people do not lend themselves to this kind of treatment and so the form remains empty.

We must not bury ourselves in the gloomy thought that everything is going wrong; nor let it be a matter of indifference to observe which way God appears to be moving in order that we too may move in the same direction. This is especially important for those who are responsible for education; for the formation of those who will see the future and who will more or less make it.

In what direction is history moving at the present time? That is what I want you to consider. Which are the nations whose ordinary customs and daily habits are most likely to prevail? I mean, of course, good habits, for they are the only ones which ever prevail in the real sense of the word; the only ones which end in getting something done. When you have caught a glimpse of the direction in which these better habits, in the purely human and temporal order, are tending, you will then perceive to what good use the Church can put them for the benefit of souls. That will open a new phase in her history.

Not, what practical conclusion can be drawn from the fine problem I set you here? Surely a most important one; that you must know what obstacles and what world-tendencies the soul you are now preparing will have to face during the next fifty years. If you teach them without any knowledge of what will soon await them, it is as if you sent them off on a journey to a country you did not know anything about. There are no doubt precautions which hold good for all journeys to all countries, but it is a great advantage to be able to take special precautions to meet special difficulties.

The souls we try to help, and especially those we try to bring to the true faith, are inclined to suspect us only of loving them because of the goal to which we want to lead them. They would rather – and quite rightly – believe that we only desire this for them because we love them. Love them, therefore, and without any hidden intention.

How supremely right you are in loving souls, whatever they are, for our Lord, and I would add, in His stead. For He has left us precisely this charge: the charge of giving others those outward signs, that sensible and visible help, that human expression of kindness to which He gave to all around Him when He was on earth – where we stand now in His place. And real goodness surely lies in expecting nothing in return, while yet never refusing it if it is offered. To give in order to receive, with the intention of receiving, is really not to give at all. But what joy there is in those gifts, whether they be great or small, in which we have been able to help or be kind to some poor creature like ourselves, in the name of the Lord Jesus, who has so earnestly asked this of us. It does not matter whether our gift is noticed or taken any account of by the recipient; he has at any rate received a good which came through us, through us from the Lord Jesus who is Love Supreme.

In every age God has scattered forerunners in the world. They are those who are ahead of their time and whose personal action is based on an inward knowledge of that which is yet to come. If you and I should happen to be forerunners, let us bless God for it, even though, living a century or two too soon, we may feel ourselves to be strangers in a foreign land…

Rejoice then in the light which you have been given and do not be surprised that it is so difficult to pass it on to others. It really is making its way, not so much through you or me as through force of circumstance. You are simply ahead of your time; it is a good thing to have long sight and to let your soul be illumined as soon as you are aware of the light. Intelligent people can no longer deceive themselves about old systems and old ideas, circumstances having radically changed and changed beyond possibility of recall. Such people are in just the same situation as yourself. It is a situation which often seems hard but is in reality infinitely less hard than the contrary situation would be. For that would mean living in falsehood and driving into falsehood new generations who would be bound to suffer even more than we ourselves.

Read and enjoy, my friends.

~ S.K. Orr