Put Ye On the Lord Jesus Christ

Mary

My child, it is a difficult task to recognize your great enemy; it is a task a thousand times greater to exterminate it. By yourself you will never succeed; but if you remain close to me, you will triumph.

2. Begin by carefully observing how your dominant tendency shows itself. Learn to recognize the multiple forms, apparent or hidden, which it assumes, the circumstances in which it causes you the greatest harm.

3. Then start a relentless fight against it. In this battle against your defects you can follow a twofold strategy: Certain people bring all their energy to bear upon watching the diverse manifestations of their defects, so that they can note them down, count them, compare them, and endeavor each day to reduce their number. This strategy will certainly produce good results if it is used with perseverance. But this strategy if followed alone runs the risk of becoming tedious, and of being at times fraught with painful surprises. For, after having interrupted for some time your continual watchfulness over one fault in order to work at another point in your spiritual life, you will often notice that the original tendency is still there, quite as lively as before, though perhaps appearing in a slightly different guise. You occupied yourself with cutting away the weeds as they grew, but having failed to tear them out by the roots and to replace the cockle by useful grain, you discover them springing up again just as thickly as before.

4. I am going to teach you an easier and more efficacious strategy; one which, if it does not replace the other altogether, can at least complete it. Study in Jesus the virtue directly opposed to your predominant tendency. Are you proud? Consider His humility. Are you irritable? Contemplate His sweetness. Are you selfish? Admire His forgetfulness of self and His readiness to sacrifice Himself for sinners. Are you sensual- minded? Meditate on His passion.

5. Make use of your daily talks with Jesus in order to study in Him the disposition which you lack. See what Jesus thought, felt, said, and did. Set your heart on this disposition of Jesus, your Model; fill yourself with enthusiasm for it. Then compare it with your own disposition. Ask Jesus, and ask me, to change you into Him. Then plan how you will live this disposition of Jesus during the day; that is: 1) on the basis of your experience of the morning or previous day, foresee the occasions when you will be likely to give in to your defect; 2) decide on definite times when you will repeat acts of faith and various invocations tending to  establish in your soul the disposition of Jesus that you wish to acquire.
Always submit each and every one of your resolutions to me. Otherwise they will risk being vague and ineffectual. In your sacramental and spiritual communions, ask Jesus to make you live of His life.

6. Throughout the day, recall the thought of Jesus, meek, humble, patient—according to the disposition of His soul you wish to reproduce. You should recall it in particular at those moments when your evil tendency seeks to reassert itself. Instead of making painful efforts to resist it, look peacefully at your Model and say, “Jesus, what would You think, what would You do if You were in my place? Come and make me live Your life.” And Jesus will command the sea and the waves, and over your soul there will come a great calm.

7. By dint of contemplating Jesus and of drawing Him unto yourself by your prayers, you will gradually succeed in detaching yourself from that tendency to which you cling so strongly, and you will begin to have no other dispositions than those of Jesus. Still, distrust that enemy; he may take you by surprise even at the moment you think yourself perfectly secure. Examine yourself from time to time, be it merely by a rapid glance, and see whether he is not trying to come to life under a new form.

8. My Son has instructed you to imitate your Mother. After observing the dispositions of Jesus, look at my own. When you try to imagine what I probably thought, felt, or did, or what I would do in your place in regard to some fault that you ought to overcome or some virtue that you ought to acquire, it is still Jesus whom you are learning to know better and to reproduce more perfectly.

The Faithful Soul:
O Mary, teach Jesus to me, that I may live only His life!