The greatest certainty of spiritual safety in this life is to be found in thus utter self-abandonment which... consists in being driven to breaking-point and to an utter despair of oneself so as to have no hope but in God alone... Now God has given you two kinds of grace to bring you to this full self-abandonment: (1) strong inducements to tempt you to put full confidence in his great mercy and goodness; (2) surpassing understanding and penetrating awareness of your wretchedness, weakness, perversity, and general failure to achieve goodness. In effect he says to you: Know that in your present state you neither ought, nor can, in any wise help yourself, nor be helped by anything coming from that pit of corruption which is yourself. By self-abandonment, by renunciation of all recourse to self and by fixing all your thoughts upon me, do you then leave all your burdens to me!... Instead of shaking and undermining the soul's blessed joy, these discoveries inspire it with resolute trust... I have known... souls following this way to be astonished when they behold their trust in God increase proportionately with their increasing perception of their poverty, weakness, and misery. The explanation is that the keener this consciousness of our wretchedness and corruption becomes, the greater grows the self-distrust of those souls possessing it and the greater their corresponding trust in God.
--Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (died 1751) a French Jesuit, a writer, and a revered spiritual director.
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