"Every profound union or approach to intimacy with God, if real and founded in truth, involves, at first, an overwhelming realization of the distance which separates the creature from the Creator." - L. de Grandmaison.
There is in me at one and the same time splendor and nothingness.
Splendor: I carry the divine; God has His dwelling within me.
If anyone love me, said our Lord, My Father will love him, and we will come to him, and will make our abode with him. (John xiv, 23.) I know that; it is the whole doctrine of sanctifying grace. God grant that I may understand the incomparable beauty of it and that I may make of it the center and the soul of my spiritual life.
But, I carry all this divine life in a created reliquary, that is weak, made from nothingness. By nature, I am essentially a drop of nothingness, lost among other drops of nothingness which compose with me the world of nothing, the world of the created.
If the divine life within me ought to cause me unspeakable joy and boundless admiration, my nothingness ought to establish me in a humility of limitless depths.
The more a soul is elevated by the thought of the divine grandeur within it, the more does it realize its native misery and nothingness.
A crushing view? I should think so! What a distance between this nothing which is the human being and that All which is the divine! And what mercy God has showered on me for having condescended to set the rare pearl of His own life within the wretched setting of my insignificant life!
Admiration! Humility! I am nothing, yet bear All within me as my very own.
_________________
Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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