“Must you continue to be your own cross? No matter which way God leads you, you change everything into bitterness by constantly brooding over everything. For the love of God, replace all this self-scrutiny with a pure and simple glance at God’s goodness.” — St. Jane Frances de Chantal
I re-read this quote last week, and it wouldn’t leave me alone. It is all too easy to fall into a self-help trap at the beginning of the year. Every headline screams, “Improve yourself this way.” We can begin to believe that if we only find the perfect planner and make a careful checklist of each essential item (which varies from one headline to another) and then carefully attend to those, all will be well. What follows is a great deal of introspection and navel-gazing and disappointment in how we don’t measure up to our own “new” standards.
The reality is that the checklist and the planner almost certainly will not get the job of attaining holiness done. At its core, holiness is not about what we list or what we do. It’s about what we allow God to do in us. Holiness comes to us by the grace of God, just as every other good and perfect gift becomes ours. It is very likely that as we reflect on January 2022, we will notice all the ways we planned to improve and fell short, and then we will begin to brood. We will see our imperfections so clearly and we will build for ourselves a cross of them.
St. Jane de Chantal looks upon us with her hands on her hips and says, “For the love of God, replace all this self-scrutiny with a pure and simple glance at God’s goodness.” I think that for most of us, this is far better advice than, “Girl, wash your face.” God is good, all the time — even when you feel otherwise. So, stop navel-gazing and look up.
If we take our cues from Scripture or from nature, we can pause and notice God’s goodness. We see that God is good because he acts with goodness toward us. We understand that God is good because we recognize the goodness he has created in our world. Mostly though, as we contemplate Christ (instead of ourselves), we know that God’s love has been poured into our hearts. That outpouring is the purest goodness.
And that’s where we come to the end of our lists and our plans, and we stop trying so hard by our own power. The outpouring of love into our hearts is not the work of our hands or the fruit of our thoughts. It is the great gift of the Holy Spirit, experienced in our hearts.
God has demonstrated his love in innumerable ways. He gives us plenty for our minds to consider. The bounty of creation, the sacrifice of the Savior, and each of our individual blessings can be known by us. There is evidence; there is history. We can know it with our heads. Then, there is also the outpouring of the Spirit into our lives. We can feel that with our hearts. Both knowing and feeling require that we take our eyes off ourselves and fix them on the Beloved.
That outpouring of the Spirit comes to all of us, but it can come by different measures. St. Jane de Chantal encourages us to pursue the outpouring, to see it, to reach for it. At the same time, we are called to be still, to be open to it.
Still, sometimes our head knows that God is good and that he has blessed us abundantly, and our hearts lag behind. Those times call for a pure and simple glance at God’s goodness. We don’t know the mind of God and we can’t always see what he is doing, but we can know that he is doing something for our good — always. A pure and simple glance doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t try to analyze; it merely looks toward God.
I know that my days of self-scrutiny are not entirely behind me. By God’s grace, I also know that it is essential for me to remember all that he has done, all that is worked together for my good and all the goodness he plans for the rest of my days.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
