Personal reflection written in November of 1947

A great apostle is not an activist but, on the contrary, one who at every moment keeps his life under the divine impulse. Each one of our actions has a divine moment, a divine duration, a divine intensity, divine stages, and finally, a divine ending. God begins, God accompanies and God finishes. When our work is perfect it is at the same time all His and all ours. If it is imperfect it is due to our deficiencies, to our failure to keep in contact with God during the duration of the work or because we have moved ahead faster or slower than God. Our activity is not completely fruitful unless we are perfectly submissive to the divine rhythm, my will totally synchronized with the divine will.

Nonetheless, it would be dangerous to take refuge in a sleepy sort of laziness under the pretext of keeping ourselves in contact with God. Part of God’s plan for us is to be squeezed out…Charity impels us in such a way that we cannot refuse the task of consoling the downhearted, helping the poor, visiting the sick, showing gratitude for favors, giving a conference, giving advice, doing an errand, writing an article, organizing a task, all added on to a regular work schedule. If someone has begun to live for God in sacrifice and love for others, all human suffering will be found knocking at your door. If a person has had some success in the apostolate, occasions for the apostolate will multiply for him. If someone has done well in his ordinary responsibilities, he had better prepare himself for greater tasks. That is the way our life and the apostolate function, we find ourselves on a rapidly accelerating course that wears us down, particularly because we do not give ourselves time to repair our physical or spiritual strength… then one day the machine breaks down. And where we thought ourselves indispensable, someone else is put in our place.

If one wishes to zealously protect one’s hours of peace, tranquil prayer, spiritual reading… I fear we will become egoists and unfaithful servants. The charity of Christ impels us to surrender, action by action, all our activity, to make ourselves all things to all men (cf. 2Cor 5,14; 1Cor 9,22). Can we continue on our way with a tranquil conscience each time we find an agonizing victim in our path, one for whom we are “his only neighbor”?

But with it all, pray, pray. Christ retired frequently to the mount; before beginning his ministry he escaped for forty days to the desert. Christ saw clearly the divine plan but achieved only a part of it; he wished to save all men; nonetheless he lived among them for only three years. Christ had no need to reflect in order to fulfill the will of the Father; he knew the whole plan, its totality and each of its details. Nonetheless, he went apart to pray. He wished to give the Father the pure homage of all his time, to preoccupy himself entirely with Him, to praise Him alone and return all things to Him. He wished to reunite in his merciful heart all human misery, make it his own, feel oppressed by it, and weep over it before his Father, alone and in silence. Christ did not permit himself to be dragged down by activity. More than anyone else he ardently desired the salvation of his brothers; nonetheless, he withdrew from the world and prayed.

We are only disciples and sinners. How will we be able to achieve the divine plan if we do not pause frequently to rest our inner gaze on Christ, on God? Our plans, that should be part of God’s plan, must be revised and corrected every day.

After acting we must return continuously to prayer to find ourselves and to find God; to become conscious, without passion, of whether we are in fact walking in the divine path, to hear once again the call of the Father, to tune into the divine air waves, to unfurl our sails in accord with the winds of the Spirit. Our apostolic plans need control, all the more if we are generous. How many times we have wanted to embrace too much! more than our arms are capable of including!

In order to keep in contact with God, to maintain ourselves always under the impulse of the Spirit so that we may construct only according to the desire of Christ, it is necessary to impose periodic restrictions on one’s apostolic program. Action becomes harmful when it interrupts our union with God. We are not talking about a felt sense of union but true union, fidelity to the divine will, even in the details. Balance in the apostolic life can only be achieved in prayer. The saints keep perfect balance between prayer and action which are completely harmonized to the extent that they cannot be separated, but all of them have demanded of themselves hours, days even months of dedication to contemplation.

Having given to God the complete gift of itself, the soul must naturally live this life of prayer. Many lose years and years in cheating or holding back something from God. The majority of spiritual directors do not insist enough in the complete gift of oneself. They leave the soul in a mediocre type of behavior: they ask and offer pious practices, complicated prayers. This is not sufficient to empty a soul of itself; this does not fill the soul, nor perceive its true dimensions, nor flood it with God. Only a total love dilates the soul to its true measure. It is through the gift of itself that it must begin, continue and terminate.

To give oneself is the fulfillment of justice; it is to offer oneself and all one has; it is to direct all one’s capacities for action toward the Lord; it is to dilate one’s heart and firmly direct the will toward Him who awaits us; to give oneself is to love forever and as completely as one is capable of so doing. When one has given oneself, everything seems simple. One has found liberty and experiences the truth of St. Augustine’s words: Love and do what you will.