On the Threshold of Life

No one has the use of reason at his or her birth, and few can exercise reason at their Baptism, since many of us were baptized as infants. St. John Eudes invites - even insists - that each year on the anniversaries of these events to renew our devotion to Jesus. In The Life and the Kingdom of Jesus, Father Eudes offers this passage on Christian Devotion. He goes on after this passage to speak of the forming of Jesus in the Christian soul. Later in the same work the saint offers advice about commemorating these important anniversaries.From St. John Eudes' own pen: True Christian DevotionAfter what has been said so far about Christian virtues, it is easy to see what true Christian devotion is and in what it consists. Since all the Christian virtues are nothing else but the virtues which our Lord Jesus Christ practiced on earth, which must be continued by us while we are in this world, it necessarily follows that true Christian devotion is simply Jesus Christ's holy and divine devotion, that we are bound to perpetuate and fulfil in ourselves. Now, for our Lord Jesus Christ, devotion was a matter of accomplishing, with the greatest perfection, everything that His Father willed, and of taking all His pleasure in this alone. His devotion consisted in serving His heavenly Father, and in serving even men for the love of His Father, since He willed to take the form and lowly condition of a servant in order to pay more honor and homage to the supreme greatness of His Father by His own abasement. His devotion consisted in loving and glorifying His Father and in causing His Father to be loved and glorified in the world; of doing all that He did purely for the glory and love of His Father with most holy, most pure and most divine dispositions - namely, with the most profound humility, the most burning charity for men, the most perfect detachment from self and from all created things, the closest union with His heavenly Father, the most rigorous submission to His Father's will, and with all joy and satisfaction. Finally, His devotion consisted in being altogether immolated and sacrificed purely for the glory of His Father, since He willed to take upon Himself the role of victim, and in this capacity to undergo every sort of contempt, humiliation, privation, interior and exterior mortification and, finally, a cruel and shameful death. for the everlasting glory of His divine Father.