Abandonment to Divine Providence The Sacrament of the Present Moment

God is found not only in prayer and religious practices, but in the circumstances of this present moment. We spend so much of our lives looking backwards with regret or forwards with anxiety. Three centuries ago, the French Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade offered a remarkably simple answer: learn to receive the present moment as the place in which God is already meeting you. For Caussade, God's grace is present not only in prayer and explicitly religious acts, but in the circumstances of our lives as they actually unfold - in ordinary duties, interruptions, disappointments, and even in circumstances we would never have chosen for ourselves. His teaching has come to be known as the "sacrament of the present moment." Like Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God, Caussade's counsel was not originally conceived as a book. It consists largely of letters of spiritual counsel, gathered and published after his death. It is a Catholic classic that has found a wider audience among Christians seeking a deeper life of prayer and trust in God. At the heart of Caussade's teaching is the Christian's abandonment to Divine Providence: not an attempt to escape ordinary life, but a willingness to receive each moment as it comes and to seek God's will within it. His model is Mary at the Annunciation, whose response to God's call was: "Let it be to me according to your word." The saints kept no secret you lack. They received each moment as it came. Caussade's invitation is not to escape ordinary life, but to recognise it as the place in which God is already meeting us.