Meditation for Wednesday of the Third Week after Easter, May 14, 2025: Obligations of the Interior Life
Excerpt from the book Meditations for all the Days of the Year
Obligations of the Interior Life
Preparation
After having learnt, from the example set us by the Savior, in what the interior life consists, we shall see that this life is:
A duty of reason.
A duty of faith.
We will then make the resolutions:
To avoid all which tends to dissipation of thought, and to recall the presence of God to ourselves, from time to time, by a moment of recollection and of reflection.
To mingle with our different occupations the frequent use of ejaculatory prayers, and, above all, the practice of offering to God everyone of our actions.
Our spiritual nosegay shall be the words of Jacob: “Indeed the Lord is here and I knew it not.” (Genesis 28:16)
Let us adore the holy soul of Jesus Christ, always perfectly recollected in God, always praising, glorifying, and loving His adorable perfections, and let us offer Him all the homage of which we are capable. Let us beg of Him to enable us to enter into His sentiments and into His practice.
First Point
Reason Makes the Interior Life a Law for us.
On the sole account that reason shows to us God present in the bottom of our heart as well as in the splendors of the saints, it thereby imposes on us the duty of thinking of Him, of respecting His presence, of speaking to Him, of adoring Him, of praising Him, of thanking Him, of asking of Him grace, and soliciting pardon for our sins; it prescribes us to listen with holy recollection to His interior word, which excites so many good thoughts and good sentiments in whoever will listen to it; it tells us, lastly, to please Him by the offering of our actions, by the sacrifice of our wills, of our tastes, and of all that we are, by the practice of virtues, above all of the humility which abases us in the presence of His greatness, and by the divine love which raises us to Him, so that from thenceforth His heart and our own are but one.
We are astonished that anchorites should have thus spent the half of a century in a cavern, deprived of intercourse with men; but if we knew of what value is the society of God, with whom they kept company night and day in the bottom of their hearts, and how creatures are as nothing to a soul which has the Creator with it, we should be much more astonished to see man think so much of creatures and so little of his God, who accompanies him everywhere, occupy himself so greedily and so continually with what is worth nothing, so rarely and so coldly with Him who is everything.
Oh, how sin must have obscured the senses in order to make us forget, as we do, the great God whose presence invests and penetrates us, and to prefer to Him the thought of the miserable things of this lower world, and even the phantoms of our imagination!
Second Point
Faith Makes the Interior Life a Law for us.
In the same way, says Jesus Christ, that the shoot draws its life from the vine, by receiving from it what is most interior in it, which is the sap, the juice by which it itself lives, so you cannot live spiritually excepting in so far as you remain united to Me. If you do not remain in Me, He continues, you shall be cast out like the dry and sterile shoot which is cast into the fire (John 15:4-61).
In conformity with this doctrine, the apostle St. Paul says to us: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5) “Though our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). “I bow my knees to the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ” he says to the Ephesians, “that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened by His Spirit with might unto the inward man, that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts, being rooted and founded in charity.” (Ephesians 3:14, 16, 17). “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.” (Romans 8:9).
There is, indeed, no Christian action except that which is performed in the spirit of Jesus Christ, after the pattern set us by Jesus Christ and in union with Jesus Christ. Now, when the interior life is neglected, actions are performed without being inspired by faith, without any thought of Jesus Christ, and outside Jesus Christ, even as though He did not exist. Is it not too often that we thus act?
Meditations for All the Days of the Year, Vol. 3 by Reverend M. Hamon, S. S. (Benzinger Brothers, 1894, pages 64-67).
“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine: you the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.” — John 15:4-6