A Trick of the Divine

From Spiritual Letters by Father Jean Paul de Caussade

I would gladly shout out everywhere: Self-abandonment! Self-abandonment! And again self-abandonment. A self-abandonment without limits or reservations, and that for two real reasons:
First because the greatness of God and Its Sovereign dominion over us demand that all should bow, should be as it were beaten down and annihilated before Its supreme majesty. Its infinite greatness is wholly out of proportion with our littleness. It dominates everything, contains everything, swallows up everything in Its immensity….He is He-Who-Is, by whom everything is, in whom everything is and who is All in all Things. Other beings compared with nothingness appear to be something, but compared with God they appear to be nothing. Their being and substance are borrowed, while God exists solely of Itself and is no one’s debtor but Its own.
The second motive of this unreserved self-abandonment is that God has no sooner obtained from His creature the homage due to Its infinite Majesty, than It gives free course to Its infinite goodness…So that in the depths of this act of self-abandonment where she was to find pure nothingness, she finds the infinite. What a bargain from the hands of the Divine Liberality! What ingenuity on the part of Divine Wisdom! What a trick the Divine Goodness has played on the soul!