Knowing God, following God

“There are two ways of knowing how good God is:
one is never to lose Him,
and the other is to lose Him and then to find Him.”
Archbishop Fulton Sheen

(the Conciergerie or Prison in Paris, France / Julie Cook / 2018)

“It is, then, in following the will of God,
in spite of all the difficulties that may arise both from within and from without,
in the constant offering of ourselves to God as the creatures of His hand to do and to be
what He would have us, in the surrender of one thing after another that comes between us
and Him and holds us back—-
it is in such acts that we unite ourselves with those glorious beings
who cast their crowns before the throne and with those unfallen creatures who have
never known what it is to have a wish or thought apart from the will of God.

Amongst those glorified saints there are, indeed, many whose wills were for a long time
in revolt against God’s will and who brought themselves at last into subjection,
many to whom the will of God here on earth meant the sacrifice of everything the heart
most loved, many to whom it meant the sacrifice of life itself.

But all that is past and over, and its fruits remain—-
the eternal life of oblation and union with God, where one will rules those countless
multitudes and binds them together and to God,
where each one of those countless millions lives his own complete and perfect life yet
never jars on any other, where each is perfect in itself and all together
compose one perfect whole—the Body of Christ.”
Fr. Basil Maturin, p. 47
An Excerpt From
Spiritual Guidelines for Souls Seeking God