St. Alphonsus was an Italian Bishop who lived from 1696 – 1787. “Uniformity with God’s Will” is a small book published by TAN books that contains these words relevant to all of us facing adversity, including aging, dementia, and caregiving:
The essence of perfection is to embrace the will of God in all things, prosperous or adverse. In prosperity, even sinners find it easy to unite themselves to the divine will; but it takes saints to unite themselves to God’s will when things go wrong and are painful to self-love. Our conduct in such instances is the measure of our love of God.
St. John of Avila used to say: “One Blessed be God’ in times of adversity, is worth more than a thousand acts of gratitude in times of prosperity.”
Furthermore, we must unite ourselves to God’s will not only in things that come to us directly from his hands, such as sickness, desolation, poverty, and death of relatives but likewise in those we suffer from man- for example, contempt, injustice, loss of reputation, loss of temporal goods and all kinds of persecution. On these occasions, we must remember that whilst God does not will the sin, he does will our humiliation, our poverty, or our mortification, as the case may be.
