My spiritual friend in God, see to it that you leave behind all the speculative reflections of your natural faculties and give complete worship to God with your substance, offering your own self simply and entirely to him.

You have no business now except to make sure that your blind awareness of the substance of your being be lifted up in gladness and loving desire to be joined and made one in grace and in spirit with the precious being of God just as he is in himself.

Take care that nothing remains for your mind to work on but the simple extension of your will reaching out to God. This simple extension means nothing else but a blind awareness of your own existence… surrendered.

The man who makes a true and perfect sacrifice of himself, with a common intention for all, does all that in him lies to fasten all men to God as effectively as he himself is.

And no man can do greater charity than this, to sacrifice himself for his brothers and sisters… offering up that simple awareness of the substance of his own being.

For if we look at it rightly, the foundation and force of this exercise shall be seen to be nothing but the glorious gift of love in which all the law is fulfilled. “The fullness of the law is love.”

So be as blind in the loving contemplation of your God as you are in the simple contemplation of your own being. With all speculation abandoned and left far behind give worship to God with your substance – all that you are and what you are, to the whole of him who is as he is. For he alone, in himself and without anything else, is his own blessed being and yours.

And so, through this union, in a way that is wonderful, you shall worship God with God himself. For what you are you have of him and he is what it is. And although you had a beginning in the creation of your substance, at the same time your being was always in him without any beginning, and always shall be without any ending, just as he is himself.

So, keep yourself recollected and undistracted as far as you can by grace and the strategy of spiritual endurance. For in this blind awareness of the substance of your being, which is one with God, you must do all that you have to do: eat and drink, sleep and awaken, walk and sit, speak and be silent, labour and rest. Every day you must offer it up to God as the most precious offering you can make. It must take the first place in all your activities. And, therefore, I pray you to persevere steadfastly in this exercise, constantly lifting up to him your loving consent with the eagerness of love.

Look up, then, and say in your heart: “What I am Lord, I offer to you; for you are what I am.”

• Epistle of Prive Counseling