And, in General, with All Beings
That Enter into My Life. It Also Governs My Attitude
in Respect to All Situations and Events
in Which I Find Myself Involved

(1) I do not exist alone on this earth. There are other creatures, too—money, food, plants, animals. There are various conditions of body and soul: wealth and poverty, good health and bad, sadness and joy, success and failure, honors and humiliations. There are the circumstances of my state of life, my family life. And most especially, there are other men who have the same divine destiny as myself.

It is necessary that I set up a network of ordered relationships with everything that is “created”: ordered according to God’s order, ordered according to the absolute, exclusive nature of his plan of love: “You worry about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one” (Luke 10:42).

All created things wait for me to give them a meaning. For “the whole of creation is waiting with eagerness for the children of God to be revealed . . . with the intention that the whole creation itself might be freed from its slavery to corruption and brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Rom 8:19–21).

(2) Here then is the rule that imposes itself on me: all things on …the face of the earth are created for man to help him to achieve his destiny as a son of God.

From this it follows that man should make use of created things insofar as they help him in the attainment of his destiny and that he should have nothing to do with them insofar as they are an obstacle or hindrance to him.

In other words, I ought to love everything with the heart of a son, that is, according as God, my Father, wants each thing for me. And I ought to rid myself of them with the heart of a son, according as God, my Father, does not want them for me.

(3) God manifests his will to me by his Providence as Creator (ordinarily he desires that man be healthy in mind and body, that families be united, that justice and love reign between men [see the Commandments, the counsels, the Beatitudes]). He does so through the teachings of his Son Jesus Christ and through what happens to me. His “order” is not a static, unchangeable order; it is a living order, revealing itself to me day in and day out, in the changing circumstances of my life; it is a dynamic order in which light and strength are together progressively revealed in my human conscience.

(4) Because at each instant, I conduct myself as a son of God in respect to every single “created thing”, it is necessary that I remain indifferent to all created things as far as I am allowed free choice and as far as God does not prohibit me from choosing them. Consequently, for my part I do not will health more than sickness, riches more than poverty, honor more than dishonor, a long life rather than a short life, and so for all other things, but I will desire and choose only those things that lead me to the end for which I was created, that is, to love God.

(5) This fundamental indifference is a difficult yet critical way of looking at things. It must be understood in the light of the Gospel: to be indifferent means placing the love of God before every other love and every other aversion. It is living out charity.
Indifference is a free and deliberate choice: “I choose God . . . and with his grace, I shall always be faithful to this choice.”

— Indifference, therefore, does not mean being unconcerned or insensitive: I can have a horror of sickness and death and yet love them because they are God’s will for me, etc.

— Indifference does not take away those things I spontaneously find attractive or repulsive because of my personality or temperament, but I “accept” them only insofar as they concur with God’s will for me. Indifference is a disposition of my freedom that makes no choice before knowing that God wants that which I choose.

— A “passion” ordered to God would be good; one that was inordinate or not disposed to his will would be evil. So it is a matter of “orienting” our temperament, our “heart” in a radical way. Compare the outbursts of anger and tenderness of a St. Paul: grace does not do away with these, but it directs them in terms of the love of Christ.

— Far from putting a damper on my enthusiasm for the projects of my personal, familial, professional, or social life, indifference really stimulates them: it is God’s will that “I am” and that I strive toward being, for myself, for others, and for the world more of what I am. At the same time, however, when the will of God is that I fail, that I become less important, or that I die, indifference enables me to accept failure, setback, death as a mysterious success: Did Christ save the world more by his work in Nazareth or his miracles and preaching than by his Passion?

— The type of the perfectly indifferent man was the one God called in the Bible “my just one” and “the man after my heart”, that is, Abraham, Job.

(6) To sum up: indifference does not mean anything more than this profound, living disposition of spirit that enables me to choose this attitude freely with God’s help: “God is everything for me; apart from him whatever is created is nothing. Todo . . . nada.”