Abandonment to Divine Providence: With Letters of Father de Caussade on the Practice of Self-Abandonment

Here all Christian masterpieces converge, at the battle between ruling
ourselves or serving Christ. At the top of any list of classics treating such
spiritual warfare must be the Jesuit father Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675–
1751) and his L’Abandon à la Providence Divine, best known in English as,
Abandonment to Divine Providence. This work is actually a collection of
conferences and retreat notes given to the Sisters of the Visitation in Nancy,
France when Fr. de Caussade was chaplain there from 1733–1740. In his
years shepherding the sisters and those from the area who would come to
him for direction, Fr. de Caussade never tired of emphasizing how we must
trust God enough to hand ourselves over to him continuously and
completely in the most concrete circumstances of our lives.
Steeped in such a vision of God and the world, de Caussade understood
early on that the only way to realize the great purpose of human living was
to see God’s will in all things “on the face of the earth” and thus to embrace
them for the sole purpose of glorifying their benevolent Creator. Such a
spirituality is very “world friendly” in that God is never relegated to
ceremony or religious piety but is found in and through the definite
demands of every Christian life. As de Caussade himself would hold: “If we
could lift the veil, and if we were attentive and watchful, God would
continually reveal himself to us, and we should see his divine action in
everything that happened to us, and rejoice in it. At each successive
occurrence we should exclaim: ‘It is the Lord’, and we should accept every
fresh circumstance as a gift of God.”