A Year with the Saints - 25 March

Do you know what is the highest degree of abnegation of one's own will? It consists in allowing ourselves to be employed in such things as others choose, without ever making any resistance. - Saint Francis de Sales

When Saint Basil was visiting the monasteries of his diocese, he asked an abbot if he had no monk who showed more than the rest that he belonged to the number of the predestinate. The Abbot presented to him one who was very simple. The Saint ordered him to bring some water, and when he had quickly brought it, told him to sit down and wash his feet, which he did immediately, without showing the slightest reluctance. The following day, as he was going into the sacristy, he bade him approach the altar, as he wished to ordain him priest; and he received the priesthood without any resistance. From these things, the Saint considered him dead to his own will and his own judgment, and therefore worthy to be held as one of the predestinate. A little while after, some strangers entered his cell by night, took him, and led him unresistingly into their country, and there shut him up in a wretched hut, where he remained quietly, without a word to anyone. But a few days after, some men from another region took him out, still without a word on his part, and carried him away to the place from which they came, and there he stayed contentedly, as one dead to the world.

- text taken from A Year with the Saints, composed by an unknown Italian, translated by a member of the Order of Mercy; it has the Imprimatur of Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan, Archdiocese of New York, New York, 21 January 1891