Praying with Mother Yvonne-Aimée
Is this not a lovely photo of the young Yvonne Beauvais? There is a mysterious beauty in the purity of her gaze. Already, she belonged entirely to Jesus. I have long loved the prayer of hers that I translated below. The one line, “Give Thou me what Thou wouldst have me give Thee,” is an assurance of Our Lord’s merciful goodness in those hours and on those days when all I know is my own weakness and poverty.
On January 1, 1926, at the beginning of a year full of uncertainties, Yvonne Beauvais (the future Mother Yvonne-Aimée de Jésus) invoked Saint Michael the Archangel, the glorious prince of the heavenly armies, against the world of darkness. Then, in a surge of faith, she wrote this prayer in a new red notebook:
O Lord Jesus, I surrender myself fully
to all Thy mysterious operations in my soul.
I am nothing and can do nothing without Thee.
Give Thou me what Thou wouldst have me give Thee.
Do Thou in me all that Thou wouldst find in me
so that, out of my nothingness,
Thou mayest draw all the glory and all the love
that Thou hadst in view in creating me.
She added:
I will recite this prayer each day, doing my best to be very abandoned into His divine hands — seeing only Him through my neighbour — Him in the events of each day– Him always and everywhere.
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Dear Father,
Have you ever thought about this “motion of surrender” that starts somewhere deep inside a soul, at a very particular moment in its relationship with God ? How the saints have composed very similar “Acts of Abandonment”? I just was reading again the ones by Marthe, by Charles de Foucauld and by Therese de Lisieux. The language is so similar and the deepest essence is the same : a profound desire to give the Creator the only thing we truly have that is ours to give Him…..Our Free Will. Surrender. Abandonment. The desire to give back to the One who has given us everything.
There is this intense call to “gift”, a desire to give unconditionally…and it seems to be a process: at some point comes the realisation that we have nothing to give…since all we are and have already belongs to Him and we cannot give Him something that is already His ! Then, the eventual response surfaces that we do have something to offer: our Will.
Isn’t it strange that love causes a soul to want to make a gift and that the ultimate gift is one of self-emptying love? If we did not have this “pro-creative” cycle of desire for gift of self, then creation would cease, wouldn’t it?
Jesus says : “Father, why have you abandoned me ?” because the Gift appears to have been withdrawn at that instant on the Cross. And then He says :”Father, into your hands I commend my spirit “. He gives …even though He does not sense at that moment that there is someone on the other end to receive it. He is not there waiting for the Father to say :” Yes Son, here I am! Just hand it over to me right now.” No . That is not what is happening here : Jesus is giving the Gift regardless, expecting nothing in return. Free gift. Total gift. No strings attached. No expectation. Just pure gift.
And this very essence of desire to offer God a Free Gift of Love is what is moving in a soul when it composes a prayer like the beautiful one above, written when Mother was 25 . Is it not often then that this soul will experience the Dark Night, or as you write : “a year full of uncertainties”….once it decides to give the Gift ? Just like Jesus on the Cross, we have the chance to make the gift for free,on our tiny little scale. And it is called Charity.
O my ….how the Lord purifies our love, testing it in the Fire of Truth !
Surely without His Grace and the Inheritance of Christ on the Cross to claim as our own, we could never , ever, ever dream of loving like this…
Thank you so much for this blog! Almost every entry contains nectar!
Kenneth