Remember the words of St Francis de Sales: ‘One cannot put on perfection as one puts on a dress.’ The secret you ask for I give you freely:
All that is good in you comes from God, all that is bad, spoilt and corrupt, comes from yourself.
Therefore put on one side the nothingness, the sin, the evil inclinations and habits, a whole heap of miseries and weaknesses, as your share, and it belongs to you in truth.
All that remains: the body with all its senses, the soul with its faculties, and the small amount of good performed, this is God’s and belongs to him so absolutely that you could not appropriate any part by the least act of complacency without committing a theft and robbery from God.
That which you so often repeat interiorly, ‘Lord, you can do all things, have pity on me’, is a good and most simple act; nothing more is required to gain his all-powerful aid.
Keep constant to these practices and interior dispositions; God will do the rest without your perceiving it.
Jean Pierre de Caussade sj 1675-1751, Lettres spirituelles
