Meditation for January 10, Spiritual Picking

"The great grace of the Nativity is the grace of birth with Jesus to the holy liberty of the children of God. The child receives with simplicity what his Father says to him. You make yourself a doctor of laws. You examine all that is said to you; you analyze it; you search the details. God is too pure, too noble to bother about this nonsense, these distinctions. Take advice given you in a broad and natural sense and abandon the rest to God...the more you play the lawyer, the jurisconsult, the more you will be entangled in a maze of details. God does not love pedants."

Dom Marmion gave this counsel a month before his death.

Before him St. Francis de Sales warned Lady de la Flechere, who passed all the time of her spiritual exercises picking at her conscience, "I wish I had a good hammer to take the edge off your mind, which is too keen for your own advancement. I am just telling you that you must advance in devotion with an easy spirit. Do not think you must be under a constant mental strain; it is sufficient that your faults serve to humiliate you. Don't pick at your conscience any more." Just as the examination of con­science is a useful exercise when it is intelligently understood, so is the constant picking at the soul a fruitless exercise, barren and discouraging; hence not only useless but harmful.

I must know my sinfulness and work at it courageously but not pry into it unceasingly. Imperturbable confidence in God. God has not called me to His service to abandon me. I must hope in Him. Serenity. The spirit of a child.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)