Eugene continues to write to his father to give him advice on how to maintain the momentum of his experience of conversion. Much of what Eugene says actually reflects his own personal spiritual practices. It invites us to question ourselves as to what we do daily to maintain the momentum of our relationship with God and others through constant conversion of heart, spirit and actions.
(To protect confidentiality, Eugene writes of his father in the third person, “tell the person whom you spoke to me about”):
Tell the person you spoke to me about, whom God has given the grace of coming to a timely self-knowledge to spend the rest of his days in expiating his faults, that he should not let a single day go by without measuring the depths from which the goodness of God has pulled him back, as by a miracle,
to set himself a rule that obliges him to labour towards his salvation.
Let him meditate each day on some great truths,
correctly direct the purpose of his habitual actions even the most routine;
let him offer up his many difficulties, sufferings, afflictions in union with the Saviour’s merits, for the expiation of his sins;
he should not let himself be depressed at all by the sight of the little that remains for him to give to God in comparison with what he has given to the devil. This thought should lead him to do everything that depends on him for the reparation of his faults, but it must not discourage him.
If the enemy attacks him in this area, he should recall the consoling parable of the worker who received his wage even though he came to work in the lord’s vineyard only at the eleventh hour.
He should pray a number of times during the day, read even if it is only for a half-hour some good book, and alternatively the life of a saint; nothing does more good.
In the evening he should examine how the day was employed, take himself to task for his infidelity, if he has let pass more than a quarter of an hour without lifting up his soul to God with some short aspiration.
But urge him especially, in my name, to go often, very often to confession.
Letter to his father, C.A. de Mazenod, 7 July 1816, O.W. XV n. 137