5.4.III. Self-Custody Aided by Devotion to Our Lady

O my Immaculate Mother, when, on Calvary, the words of Your Son made me also a child of yours, it was in order that you might then aid me to keep my heart united, through Jesus, to the Holy Trinity.

I want my ever more frequent invocations to you, to aim above all at this custody of my heart, so that I may purify all its tendencies, intentions, affections, and desires.

I desire no longer to close my ears to your sweet voice that urges me: “Stop that, my child! Get your heart back on the right path again! Do not think that, in what you are now doing, you are seeking only God’s glory, and nothing else.” How often have you not interrupted my dissipation, my somewhat questionable occupations, with this motherly appeal! And how often, alas, have I drowned out the sound of your voice!

Sweet Mother, from now on I am going to hear YOUR HEART REMINDING ME OF THE TRUTH, and my fidelity will correspond to it by firmly and decisively putting on the brakes. Maybe it will only be a momentary halt, like a lightning flash in the course of my activity, but it will be all I shall need to ask myself one of these questions: For whom am I doing this? How would Jesus be acting in my place? Now when I acquire the habit of always putting to myself this question in the depths of my heart, I am practicing custody of the heart. And this is what is going to enable me even in the smallest details, to keep my faculties and all their impulses in an ever more perfect habit of dependence upon God living within me.