Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), an eighteenth-century French Jesuit theologian, provided a seminal study of God’s will in Abandonment to Divine Providence. Caussade writes that to sense God in the present trains the mind to recognize each moment as an entrance into the knowledge and awareness of God, and to act accordingly.
It is easy today, in the era of the “influencers,” of people who hunger for instant fame and fortune, to feel oppressed by time and its passing, believing life to be passing them by without making any great or “newsworthy” accomplishments. The love for the future, when a person cannot wait for the moments to pass to get to another time, another day, another week, is a strong temptation. Yet this practice of living prevents us from actually experiencing the present. Each moment is a gift from God and should be savored—especially since we do not know how many moments we have in life, or how many are left.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade was a spiritual director to the Nuns of the Visitation at Nancy, France. He was a priest and rector, college professor, and director of theological study for the Jesuits. His surviving works are his short book Abandonment to Divine Providence as well as letters to the Sisters at Nancy. Caussade’s Abandonment reads like a manual for students, for those engaging the religious life as members of a religious order, but his book also is addressed to everyday people living in a secular world. One can sense in reading his work that he experienced the failures and successes that he describes, and that his understanding of divine providence came about from a life of intense devotion and prayer.
In his work, Caussade argues that each moment is an entrance into the divine, into God’s “singular moment.” How? Imagine the following: To accept God’s will present in each and every moment is to accept the moment, and to accept is to find peace. If each moment is up to me and my will alone, then I resist because of my uncertainty and powerlessness. But if each moment is God’s, and I don’t resist it but accept, then the moment is not up to me. How freeing. To surrender to God’s will is to surrender and embrace the moment to the infinite and eternal.
Caussade teaches that God’s will and my will can be simultaneous in operation. God gives us free will to choose to accept His. I can use free will to resist, but that is when anxiety and confusion take over. To allow fear and anxiety to control in the moment is to resist, to not accept, because of the assumption that my will, or another’s, is in control, not God’s.
Abandonment to divine providence is the “Sacrament of the present moment.” To abandon oneself can be by the active duty of embracing God’s will in the sacraments, or it can be by the passive duty of accepting in each moment what one discerns as God’s will. It might involve pain and suffering, but acceptance is our duty to God. Here saintliness is not in great deeds, but in willingness to accept God’s will. To accept God’s will is to discover an inner contentment; to deny God’s will is to find the ultimate punishment of anger, frustration, discontent, self-persecution. To be focused on self is “to prevent God from finding an entrance.”
Faith and love are the tools for discovering God’s will, Caussade writes. Faith provides us with the intuitive knowledge of God’s will and of the mysteries of the universe. Those with faith have a different source of information, a different knowledge, from those who examine the world by the senses alone. “To consider God equally good in things that are petty and ordinary as in those that are great and uncommon is to have a faith that is not ordinary, but great and extraordinary.”
Caussade argues that blessed are those who abide by God’s will in whatever role in life God assigns:
The more assiduously do they apply themselves to their little work, so simple, so hidden, so secret, and outwardly contemptible, the more does God embroider and embellish it with brilliant colors. On the surface of this simple canvas of love and obedience His hand traces the most beautiful design, the most delicate, and intricate patterns, the most divine figures.
There is beauty in every task. There is wonder in every job. Disappointment, being laid off, failing to get a promotion, finding one’s cherished dream hitting a wall—these are all part of God’s will. Caussade argues that to question such disappointments, or to condemn God for unexpected tragedies, is to blaspheme.
The ultimate teaching of Jean-Pierre de Caussade is love. To accept God’s will in the moment is to accept God’s love, to decide to live in that moment in love. Faith allows us to recognize the love God has for us in each moment. There is “the real presence of divine love in all creatures, and in all the events of life.”
After reading Abandonment to Divine Providence, this is my mantra: “The divine will is a deep abyss of which the present moment is the entrance.”
Image from Wikimedia Commons
