Day: January 11, 2024

Thought for the Day – 11 January – The Spiritual Combat (1589) – Dom Lorenzo Scupoli OSM (c1530-1610)

“None shall be crowned who has not fought well.” 2 Tim 2: 5

The First Two Weapons
of the Spiritual Combat

II: Of Trust in God (Confidence) The FOUR WAYS

“And this also may be accomplished in four ways:

• FIRSTLY, by asking it of God.
• SECONDLY, by gazing, with the eye of faith, at the Infinite Wisdom and Omnipotence of God, to which nothing is impossible or difficult and confiding in His unbounded goodness and unspeakable willingness, to give, hour-by-hour and moment-by-moment, all things needful for the spiritual life and perfect victory over ourselves, if we will but throw ourselves, with confidence into His Arms.
  For how shall our Divine Shepherd, Who followed after His lost sheep for three-and-thirty years, with loud and bitter cries, through that painful and thorny way wherein He spilled His Heart’s Blood and laid down His life — how shall He refuse to turn His quickening glance upon the poor sheep, which now follow Him in obedience to His commands, or with a desire (though sometimes faint and feeble) to obey Him!
  When it cries to Him piteously for help, will He not hear and laying it upon His Divine Shoulders, call upon His friends and all the Angels of Heaven to rejoice with Him?
  For if our Lord ceased not to search most diligently for the blind and deaf sinner, the lost drachma of the Gospel, till He found them — can He abandon him, who, like a lost sheep, cries and calls piteously upon his Shepherd?
  And, if God knocks continually at the heart of man, desiring to enter in and sup there and to communicate to it, His gifts, who can believe that when that heart opens and invites Him to enter, He will turn a deaf ear to the invitation, and refuse to come in?
• THIRDLY, the third way to acquire this holy confidence is, to call to mind that truth so plainly taught in Holy Scripture — that no-one, who trusted in God has ever been confounded.
• The FOURTH which will serve, at once, towards the attainment of self-distrust and of trust in God, is this — when any duty presents itself to be done, any struggle with self to be made, any victory over self to be attempted, before proposing or resolving upon it, think firstly upon your own weakness; next turn, full of self-distrust, to the Wisdom, the Power and the Goodness of God and in reliance upon these, resolve to labour and to fight generously.

Then, with these weapons in your hands and with the help of prayer (of which we shall speak in its proper place), set yourself to labour and to strive.
Unless you observe this order, though you may seem to yourself to be doing all things in reliance upon God, you will too often find yourself mistaken; for so common, is a presumptuous self-confidence and so subtle, are the forms it assumes that it lurks almost always, even under an imagined self-distrust and fancied confidence in God.

To avoid presumption, as much as possible and in order that all your works maybe wrought in distrust of self and trust in God, the consideration of your own weakness must precede the consideration of God’s Omnipotence and both, together, must precede all your actions!”

Dom Lorenzo Scupoli

PART ONE:
https://anastpaul.com/2024/01/10/thought-for-the-day-10-january-ii-of-trust-in-god-confidence/