"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise.""Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise."
Jesus Christ applied these words to Himself, and made use of them to confound the Pharisees, who were offended at the homage the people paid Him on His entry into Jerusalem, a triumphal entry which exalted His littleness and His humility. The people then recognised Him, saluted Him, and blessed Him as the Messiah, the Son of David, the King of Israel. And in so doing the people rendered to their God and Saviour a perfect homage, because they honoured His poverty, His humiliation, and His annihilation of Himself. On the contrary, the proud Pharisees, led away by their false reasoning, saw nothing in this triumph but what shocked all their ideas, nothing but what seemed to them contemptible, ridiculous, and extravagant; and their false lights, their low and human prejudices, and their wrong ideas of real greatness, blinded them and confirmed them in their unbelief.
Not only does our natural reason not understand the things of God, but it is naturally disposed to despise them and treat them as folly. This disposition is more common than we should ever think for amongst Christians, even amongst those who imagine themselves devout; these are often great enemies of an interior life, just as the Pharisees, who were the devout people of Judaism, were the greatest enemies of Jesus Christ.
We can never begin to enjoy the things of God, or even to understand them, until we enter upon a state of spiritual infancy. And what is this infancy? A spiritual child is one who feels himself incapable of reasoning or speaking about the things of God; one, who, feeling all his weakness and ignorance, allows himself to be guided by the grace of God and by those who hold the place, of God towards him; who is humble, obedient, and dependent in all things; who believes without examination whatever is told him as to his spiritual state; who accomplishes blindly whatever he is commanded, without knowing, so to speak, what he is doing. He is one who, reduced to a blind instinct, which is none the less Divine, and to a spirit of pure faith, which is superior to all reasoning, walks all the more securely that he knows neither the way by which he is being led nor the end towards which he is travelling. He is in the same state as Saint Paul when, blinded by the heavenly light, his companions led him by the hand to Damascus without his seeing at all of himself where he planted his footsteps.
I repeat it once more: we either cannot discern anything at all about our interior state, or we see badly, and make mistakes, as long as we are guided by our own spirit. The total loss of our own spirit is what introduces us into the secrets of God; and the more we advance the more this loss increases, until at last it becomes complete and irrevocable. Those who think their advancement consists in having great light of the understanding, or sublime ideas, or profound reasonings, are very much deceived. The devil has more intelligence, more knowledge, more exalted ideas, than all men put together. When he lost his happiness for ever he did not lose his natural intelligence; it even serves to torment him still more.
Therefore, all our spiritual progress consists in the annihilation of our own spirit and of our own judgment, so that we have absolutely no reliance what- ever on ourselves, that we see nothing with our own sight, that we judge of nothing and reason upon nothing of ourselves.
This state is quite incomprehensible to any one who has had no experience of it. The enemies of the interior life treat it as a vision and a fancy. But it is very real, and is confirmed by the experience of many saints; Holy Scripture speaks of it in a thousand places; and we shall never thoroughly understand the teaching of the Gospel and the life of Jesus Christ unless we are in this blessed state of spiritual infancy. Yes, happy, thrice happy is he who, having given his whole mind and heart to God, knows no longer whether he has a mind or a heart; who does not even know what God is doing with him; who practises virtue without thinking that he practises it; who prays always, without knowing how he prays, or even that he is praying at all; who loves without reflecting upon his love; who walks on calmly, without knowing his way, or seeing the progress he makes; who, in a word, perfectly forgets himself, and, without care or anxiety, without reflection or thought of the future, reposes in peace upon the bosom of God as a little infant sleeps upon his mother's breast.
This is the state from which God derives the most perfect homage, because in it God is everything and the creature is nothing, because God does with this creature just what He wishes, as He wishes, and as much as He wishes, without finding the slightest obstacle to His designs. What is it that most honours God? Is it our great actions, our magnificent projects? Is it our great austerities, our long prayers, our multiplied practices of devotion? Is it even our crosses, and sufferings of all kinds? No: nothing of all that can in itself honour God. Pride can poison all that, self-love and our own will can be the motive principle of it, and with a semblance of holiness we may be all the time rejected of God. What really honours God is our destruction, our self-annihilation, the entire consuming of the victim!
Now, it does not belong to us to destroy and annihilate ourselves. If we could do so by any principle that is in ourselves, this principle would draw its life and strength from the death of all the rest. The work of our destruction belongs only to God. The destroying principle must be from outside, and must attack our whole being. The fire that consumes the victim must come from on high; and all that the victim has to do is to remain quietly upon the altar, fully consenting to be consumed, and offering no resistance to his total destruction.
During this operation the victim must be purely passive; it is God who must move his soul to act; he must not pay any attention to what the Divine fire is doing to him; he must not even look at it, for if he looks at all, it is an act of life, and as long as he looks or is able to look he is not dead.
Thus, that state of spiritual infancy which despoils us of our own spirit, of our own will, and of our own life, to make way for the Spirit and the will and the life of God, is the beginning of the mystical death; it is the creation of the new man and the destruction of the old man. And in proportion as the old man is destroyed the new man grows and thrives, and when the new man is perfectly formed the other is perfectly annihilated.
We see clearly now that the spiritual life, like the natural life, must begin by infancy that infancy is the entrance to it and the first step in it; the foundation of the man, and all that constitutes his state as a perfect man, both in body and soul, is in the little child. Time, and food, and education, and exercise, and experience, may develop his spiritual and corporeal faculties. But from his earliest infancy all those faculties are already there in miniature. And it is the same with the spiritual man. When God wishes to form that in us, He produces it by His grace in the state of a little child: afterwards, by the continual operation of this same grace, with which the soul co-operates by a full consent and an inviolable fidelity, God gives her, little by little, and by almost insensible degrees of progress, increase and perfection. God always does first the most essential part, which is the formation of this spiritual child; He does it alone, and the child contributes nothing to his own formation, but when he is once formed he must second the action of God, not by acting of himself, but by doing all that God wishes him to do and by suffering all that God wishes him to suffer.
It is quite right that God should give this child a director to guide him, for how can he guide himself in this state? And the child and his guide must both be perfectly submissive to all the movements of Divine grace. And God requires of the child an unbounded confidence and an entire obedience to him who is given as his guide. This confidence must go so far that the child must communicate without reserve to his guide everything that passes in the most secret and closest depths of his soul, and this obedience must be such that the child has no longer any will of his own or any judgment upon anything whatsoever.
- taken from Manual for Interior Souls, by Father Jean Nicolas Grou