5.4.I. The Need for Self-Custody

My God, You are Holiness itself, and here on earth You only admit a soul to intimacy with You in the measure in which it applies itself to destroy or to avoid everything that can soil or stain it in any way.

And yet I can find myself SWARMING LIKE AN ANTHILL WITH VENIAL SINS or deliberate imperfections, which deprive my soul of all the abounding graces which You held in store for me from all eternity. Consider a few of these sins—like the failure through spiritual laziness, to raise up my soul to God; an inordinate love of creatures; hasty temper and impatience; nursing a grudge; being capricious and changeable; getting soft, loving whatever is easy and gives pleasure; always talking without any cause about the faults of other people; dissipation, and a lot of curiosity about things that have nothing whatever to do with the glory of God; spreading scandal, gossiping, and making rash and stupid judgments of others; vain self-complacency; contempt of others, and constant criticism of their conduct; always looking for admiration and praise, and doing things with these in view; showing off anything that is to my credit; presumption, stubbornness, jealousy, lack of respect for superiors, murmuring; no mortification in eating, drinking, and so on.

Can my mental prayer and my liturgical life be any good if they do not bring me, bit by bit, to such a state of recollection that my soul will be wakeful against even faults of plain weakness; if they do not help me to pick myself up again right away as soon as my will begins to give in; and even if they do not, in certain cases, lead me to impose certain sanctions upon myself?

What a thought, Dear Lord! If I do not watch myself, I can paralyze Your activity in me!

Masses, Communions, Confessions, my other pious exercises, the special protection of Divine Providence with my eternal salvation in view, the tender concern of my Guardian Angel, and, worse still, even your motherly watchfulness over me, Sweet Immaculate Mother, all this can be paralyzed, canceled out, by my fault!

If I am lacking in good will to impose upon myself that constraint which You were talking about, Dear Lord, when You said: “the violent bear it away,”

Violenti rapiunt illud (Matt. 11:12).

Satan will ever be trying to catch me by surprise and lead me astray, and weaken me, and he will even go so far as to pervert my whole conscience with his illusions.

O my soul! Some of those falls which you think are mere weakness are perhaps already much more than that in the eyes of God. If you do not practice custody of the heart and if you do not forge ahead in carrying out the program of keeping all the motives of my actions purely for Jesus alone, how can you escape from that conclusion?

If I do not resolve upon custody of the heart, not only will I pile up a long and fearsome debt for Purgatory, but even though I may yet avoid mortal sin, I will be on the incline that inevitably leads to it. Have you thought of that, O my soul?