March 17, 2024 - "Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade"

Jesuit Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade died on March 6, 1751 at the age of 76.  We don’t know much about his life except that he spent his priestly life in a series of somewhat obscure assignments.  One of his assignments was to serve as the spiritual director to a convent of Visitation nuns in France.  In that capacity he prepared a series of conferences and wrote a series of letters for the benefit of the Visitation Nuns at that convent.  Political events in France over the next seventy-five years or so kept things in a state of upheaval. It wasn’t until a century after Father de Caussade’s death that the nuns living at the convent thought to publish de Caussade’s under the title Abandonment to Divine Providence.
 
In Abandonment to Divine Providence, Father de Caussade stated that the path to holiness lies in the performance of our everyday tasks and duties.  He wrote that every moment is given to us from God and thus bears the stamp of God’s will for us.  When we “accept what we cannot avoid and endure with love and resignation things that could cause us weariness and disgust,” we are following the path to holiness.
 
The present moment is a key concept for Father de Caussade.  He even went so far as to talk about “the sacrament of the present moment.”  He made the argument that just as Christ in the Eucharist is visible to the eyes of faith, so for the faithful Christian God’s will could be manifest perhaps in a disguised form in what otherwise might be dismissed as the ordinary or routine events of the day. By living in this spirit of mindfulness and abandonment to God’s providence our own lives could become a living Gospel. 
 
Dom David Knowles, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, wrote in 1959 that Abandonment to Divine Providence was a work of great importance.  It looks back to Saint John of the Cross and Saint Francis de Sales and forward to St. Thérèse of the Infant Jesus.  Twenty-five editions of the work appeared between 1861 and 1959.
 
If you are looking for a good book to read during Lent, I recommend Abandonment to Divine Providence.
 
Until next week,
Fr. John