Abandonment to Divine Providence
In the 1730s, a French Jesuit priest, Fr Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote a series of letters to a community of Visitation Sisters as a spiritual guide to achieving true holiness and inner peace. At the core of these letters—since published as the book Abandonment to Divine Providence—was the concept that every moment of our lives can be an encounter with God and an experience of divine grace. God’s divine providence, Fr Jean-Pierre says, encompasses every single thing that happens to us. Our abandonment to this requires an unquestioning, trusting submission to the holy will of God, just as Mary modelled in her fiat. Achieving this, he says, is the surest, and easiest, way to holiness and peace.
The concept that inner peace and holiness are found in obeying the will of God may appear to be simple, but in practice it can be challenging and requires constant and intentional effort. As with the formation of any habit, the key is in starting small and being consistent so that, in time, this submission will become both an active and passive exercise. Active in the encounter with God through undertaking of duties imposed on us by the Church (such as attending Mass on Sundays, daily prayer, fasting, and almsgiving), and passive in the encounter with God through “the loving acceptance of all that he sends us at each moment.”
When we stray from this practice, the Father sends us a gentle nudge to remind us to focus not on our will, but his. Think back over your week and reflect upon all the times he has brought an unexpected good from something bad and where he has been present in ways you had not anticipated. For myself, I can recall attending a Mass in a church out of town recently and was dismayed when I entered and saw the environment in which it would be celebrated. I knew it would not be a smooth liturgy and dreaded what I expected to be a rather agonising experience. What I ended up experiencing though was one of the most sublimely transcendent moments of my life. The disorder of the room had forced the priest to alter his usual method of celebrating the liturgy and his improvisation animated the Mass in such a way that I felt as though I was truly sitting at the feet of Jesus as he spoke with his disciples.
The more we receive God’s grace through encounters with him in the present moment, the greater the desire in us to abandon ourselves completely to his divine providence.
Many trials will be necessary before arriving at that degree of perfection in which self-love ceases to exist and is replaced by the real love of pure charity. May God give each one of us this grace.
This piece was originally published in the St Patrick’s Cathedral, Ballarat newsletter on the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, 25 January 2026.