Summary of the Morrow’s Meditation
We will meditate tomorrow upon a vice which forms one of the principal obstacles to the sanctification of the new year on which we have just entered. This vice consists in the routine or habit of doing everything hastily and without reflection. We will consider: 1st, the gravity of this evil; 2nd, its remedies. We will then make the resolution: 1st, to perform with great exactitude and in the best possible manner our spiritual exercises; 2nd, to reflect before acting, in order to excite ourselves to perform everything in a very holy manner, and with the aim of pleasing God in every one of our actions. Our spiritual nosegay shall be the prayer of the Machabees: “My God, give me a heart to love Thee and serve Thee as I ought” (II. Mach. i. 3).
Meditation for the Morning
Let us adore God, the Sovereign Lord of time, the arbitrator of our life and of our death, who gives us this new year, not that we may dispose of it after our own liking, but in order to employ every moment of it in serving Him well. Let us ask of Him grace not to fall this year into the vice which paralyzed all the preceding years; the vice of routine and want of reflection, on which Jeremias pronounced this terrible lamentation: “All the land is made desolate because there is none that considereth in the heart” (Jer. xii. 11).
FIRST POINT
Gravity of the Evil of Routine or Want of Reflection.
What greater evil can we imagine than an evil which renders the graces of God useless, faith sterile, the reform of morals impossible? Now such is the evil of routine or want of reflection.
1st. It renders graces useless. God gives us the grace of prayer; but prayer performed through routine and without reflection reduces itself to a mechanical movement of the lips, incapable of honoring God or obtaining anything from Him. God bestows upon us the gift of a good thought; of a pious movement, of a warning precious for our salvation. But this seed, which would have brought forth fruit if it had been ripened by reflection, is nothing but seed sown upon the high-road, where vain imaginations and worldly matters tread it under foot, and cause it to perish. God grants us the grace of His sacraments; but the life of routine and want of reflection paralyzes all the fruit of it. God grants us a new year wherein to work out our salvation, but routine, unless we destroy it, will only serve to accumulate upon our heads, like a fresh anathema, a year of abuse of graces added to the preceding years.
2nd. Routine and want of reflection render faith sterile. It is a deplorable thing to see what becomes of faith under the empire of routine. It has become nothing else within the soul but a secret portion of ourselves into which we never enter, or an obscure distance whence its light no longer reaches our eyes; so that we believe as though not believing; we speak, we act, we think, as though we did not really believe. The advance of death, the judgment which follows it, followed by paradise or hell, nothing touches us any longer. The most august mysteries of religion, the sacraments, even the Eucharist, find nothing in the soul but the coldness of marble. It is an indifference, an insensibility which nothing touches. We have familiarized ourselves with these great mysteries, we have made of them a routine: it is finished, they will be sterile for us as long as we have not cured the evil.
3rd. Routine renders the reform of morals impossible. Carried along by it as by a river which flows always in the same bed, we never think seriously of reforming ourselves, we do not even understand the need of it, and we do not feel any energy for it. We allow ourselves to be carried along by the torrent of habits and customs; it seems to us sweeter; it even seems to us the only thing possible. In this terrible state it is as though we were asleep. Let us fear the awaking. It will be terrible!
SECOND POINT
Remedies for Routine and Want of Reflection.
The first remedy is prayer. Let us ask God, with all the fervor of which we are capable, to cure our sick soul (Ps. xl. 5), to revive our faith (Luke xvii. 5), in the greatness of the Divinity, in the profound devotion due to it, and to give us grace to lead a better life during the new year. The second remedy is to be faithful to all our pious exercises, that is to say, not only to perform them with exactitude, but to perform them well, by bringing to them an attitude of recollection, a great desire to profit by them in regard to the improvement of our life, and always to treat God as God, that is to say, with sovereign respect. The third remedy is often and seriously to examine ourselves in order to see whether we still allow ourselves to indulge in our old habits of routine and want of reflection, whether our acts and our words, our intentions and our thoughts are always inspired by a spirit of faith, humility, and charity, which is the love of God that characterizes a Christian soul; and when we discover that we are falling back into our old habits, to rise promptly, setting ourselves to work with zeal and a good will.
Resolutions and spiritual nosegay as above.