Making Room for What Is Best, Most Beautiful, and Most Profound

I want to share another life-giving quote from The School of the Holy Spirit, but first, please read my little reflection on transplanting flowers.  (I want you to read mine first, so the last thing you read are his words and not mine). 
March 12, 2011

I was planting flowers yesterday, and as I began to extract one from the 6-pack it was imbedded in, I had to pull the roots apart and break some when necessary.  Feeling the tender plant in my hand and hearing the sound of the roots breaking, I began to think about God.  There was no way the flower could understand (even if it had eyes and a brain like we do) that the painful process it was undergoing, was for its own good.  It was getting ready to be placed in a much bigger pot, with more soil, space, and food than it could begin to imagine (if it could imagine at all).  As I looked at the little flower and how it used all of its resources to make a home in a tiny cell of a 6-pack, I felt like sometimes I do the same.  I think about throwing all of my energy at something because that’s where I am.  I become root bound.  I have trouble imagining life in a bigger pot, where I will be able to grow without limitations. 

God must extract us from our own root-boundedness (probably not a word, but you know what I mean).  His all-knowing hands, no matter how gentle, must break some of the roots we have plunged so deeply in the soil.  What are they?  For today, I’m going to think about the roots I have needlessly bound myself with and try to help God out a little, by separating them and breaking the ones I don’t need.  

Thank you, Jesus, for your example of detachment.  Please show us how to do the same.  Amen.

Now, for the life-giving quote from Jacques Phillipe that incorporates the idea of having a painful process, but for the greater good:

"What is freedom?  It does not mean giving free rein to whim, but rather enabling what is best, most beautiful, and most profound in ourselves to emerge, instead of being stifled by more superficial things such as our fears, selfish attachments, or falsity.  If we submit to God, that submission will in fact strip off a sort of shell that imprisons us, to make room for all that is genuine in us.

If we submit to God's will , it will certainly be opposed to part of ourselves.  But, this part is the negative part of us that limits us and from which God is gradually delivering us.  God's will is never opposed to what is good in us:  our aspiration to truth, life, happiness, and the fullness of love.

Submission to God prunes things in us, but never gets rid of the best that is in us:  our deep, positive aspirations.  Just the opposite:  it awakens and strengthens them, and frees them from obstacles to their fulfillment."