Interior Peace
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In effect, one of the most common strategies of the devil in
his efforts to distance us from God and to slow our spiritual progress is to
attempt to cause the loss of our interior peace. Here is what Dom Lorenzo
Scupoli, one of the great spiritual masters of the 16th century, who was highly
esteemed by Saint Francis de Sales, said: ‘The devil does his utmost to banish
peace from one’s heart, because he knows that God abides in peace and it is in
peace that He accomplishes great things.’
It would be well to keep this in mind, because, quite often
in the daily unfolding of our Christian life it happens that we fight the wrong
battle, if one may put it that way, because we orient our efforts in the wrong
direction. We fight on a terrain where the devil subtly drags us and can
vanquish us, instead of fighting on the real battlefield, where, on the
contrary, by the grace of God, we are always certain of victory. And
this is one of the great secrets of spiritual combat—to avoid fighting the
wrong battle, to know how to discern, despite the ruses of our adversary, which
is the real battlefield, what we truly have to struggle against and where we
must place our efforts.
We believe, for example, that to win the spiritual battle we
must vanquish all our faults, never succumb to temptation, have no more
weaknesses or shortcomings. But on such a terrain we are sure to be vanquished!
Because who among us can pretend never to fall? And it is certainly not this
that God demands of us, for He knows of what we are made. He remembers we
are dust (Psalm 103).
On the contrary, the real spiritual battle, rather than the
pursuit of invincibility or some other absolute infallibility beyond our
capacity, consists principally in learning, without becoming too discouraged,
to accept falling occasionally and not to lose our peace of heart if we should
happen to do so lamentably, not to become excessively sad regarding our defeats
and to know how to rebound from our falls to an even higher level. This is
always possible, but on the condition that we not panic and that we continue to
maintain our peace.
One could, then, with reason, enunciate this principle: The
first goal of spiritual combat, that toward which our efforts must above all
else be directed, is not to always obtain a victory (over our
temptations, our weaknesses, etc.), rather it is to learn to maintain peace
of heart under all circumstances, even in the case of defeat. It is only in
this way that we can pursue the other goal, which is the elimination of our
failures, our faults, our imperfections and sins. This is ultimately the
victory that we must want and desire, knowing, however, that it is not by our
own strength that we will obtain it and, therefore, not pretending that we can
obtain it immediately. It is uniquely the grace of God that will obtain the
victory for us, whose grace will be the more efficacious and rapid, the more we
place maintaining our interior peace and sense of confident abandonment in the
hands of our Father in Heaven.”
~Jacques Philippe
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