Interior Freedom

Because I had recently read and loved Fr. Jacques Philippe's Searching for and Maintaining Peace shortly before I went to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine, when I was in the gift store two other books by Fr. Jacques Philippe stood out to me. I read Interior Freedom on the plane ride home.

This book is also fairly brief at 134 pages but packed with thought provoking ideas for spiritual growth. He talked about accepting sufferings for the sake of progress and purification, as well as loving and serving God with joy, regardless of whether or not the context around us makes it easy to do so. He addressed worry and how to approach situations that can provoke anxiety, a sense of a spiritual counter-attack in order to respond with hope and trust.

Another area that stood out to me was related to understanding God's will and trying to navigate contexts in which we are not sure what God wants us to do. This was especially beneficial to me as I have pondered trying to recognize God's will and the realization that I needed to move forward in faith, rather than complete assurance. He also talked about the importance of focusing on God's will for us in the day to day, rather than an over-emphasis on expending our energy on larger-scale choices to the detriment of a proper understanding of the rhythms of our daily lives.

Some of the quotes that I marked were:

• "The worst thing that could happen would be for everything to go exactly as we wanted it, for that would be the end of any growth" (pp. 50-51). 
• "If we were always sure we were doing God's will and walking in the truth, we would soon become dangerously presumptuous and at risk of spiritual pride. Not always being absolutely sure we are doing God's will is humbling and painful, but it protects us. It preserves us in an attitude of constant seeking and prevents the sort of false security that would dispense us from abandoning ourselves to God" (pp. 54-55). 
• "It is an extraordinary source of hope and a great consolation to know that, by virtue of God's grace working in us (if we remain open to it by persevering in faith, prayer, and the sacraments), the Holy Spirit will transform and expand our hearts to the point of one day making them capable of loving as God loves" (p. 68). 
• "Disappointment in a relationship with someone from whom we were expecting a lot (perhaps too much) can teach us to go deeper in prayer, in our relationship with God, and to look to him for that fullness, that peace and security, that only his infinite love can guarantee" (pp. 70-71). 
• "That others are sinners cannot prevent us from becoming saints. Nobody really deprives us of anything. At the end of our lives, when we come face to face with God, it would be childish to blame others for our lack of spiritual progress" (p. 72). 
• "The only free act we can make in regard to the past is to accept it just as it was and leave it trustingly in God's hands" (p. 81). 

In general, this book addressed many areas that I have been pondering and extended my thinking.