I’ve continued to review and write up some excerpts from Jean Grou’s Manual for Interior Souls. Over the next five posts, I’ll be sharing some of his insights into the process of God’s getting at the major roots, then the minor roots, all the way to the tiniest rootlets of self-love. How does God take us from beginner places where we tend to love ourselves (or even God) for our own self-interest, to places where we learn more and more deeply that all of our love finds its truest place rooted in God and God himself.
“Let us follow the different states of the spiritual life, and let us see in a general manner, without going into details, how God pursues self-love from place to place in each of these states.
The most gross kind of self-love lives in the senses, and in the attachment to the things of sense. God drives it out by purifying the senses with His own sweetness and with heavenly consolations, which inspire the soul with the disgust and contempt for all earthly pleasures.” (p. 304.)
This is one of the purposes of God’s early gifts of consolation at the beginning of any new chapter of our spiritual journey. He draws us away from the allure of godless, sensual pleasure by letting us taste and see just how good God really is. He allows the sweetness of His blessing and His presence to expose the emptiness and meaninglessness of “without God” pleasures.
Most of the time these days, I don’t feel a great deal of inspiration. This is probably good reason to think that God has me in a more desolate season so as to address deeper places of my God-unawareness and self-orientation. There are so many subtle ways that I act without actual regard for God’s guiding, God’s grace, God’s empowering. Forgive me, Father.
Read part two
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