How to Grow in Detachment

A heart made for God alone

Detachment makes no sense if one forgets what the human heart is made for. It is not a mutilation, but a setting in order: the heart is emptied only because it is made to be filled — and too great for anything that is not God. Saint Augustine said it once and for all at the threshold of his Confessions:

“You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, ch. 1^[2]

If the heart is this capacity for God, then every attachment occupying it elsewhere leaves it, by definition, restless and unsatisfied. That is the experience summed up, in substance, by Léonie Martin, sister of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, writing to her sister that our heart is made only for God, alone able to fill it, too great for the world — and that it is therefore madness to attach oneself excessively to creatures^[3].

Detachment is thus not first an effort of renunciation: it is the lucidity of a heart that remembers its own measure. Creatures, says Fr. Pierre-Julien Eymard, can “amuse the heart for a moment, distract the mind; fill them, satisfy them, never”^[4].

“No one can serve two masters”

Christ does not propose detachment as an option for elite souls: he makes it a condition of life according to the Gospel. His word admits of no sharing:

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 6:24^[5]

Elsewhere he pushes the demand to its summit: “If any one comes to me without preferring me to his father and mother […] and even to his own life, he cannot be my disciple”^[6]; and more plainly still: “Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple”^[7]. The Catechism draws from these words a consequence many would like to soften, and which it maintains without softening:

“The precept of detachment from riches is obligatory for entrance into the Kingdom of heaven.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2544^[8]

This “precept” does not target money alone: it names the root of every disordered attachment. To prefer anything to God — a good, a person, an image of oneself — is to give oneself two masters, and the heart is torn apart there.

In order to love truly

The deepest reason for detaching oneself is not negative. The heart is not emptied to be left empty, but to make room for a greater love. Detachment serves charity: it is never an end, always a means. Jesus made Luisa Piccarreta grasp this with a striking image:

“Love wants to find souls empty of everything. Otherwise it cannot wrap them in its garment. […] It can clothe the soul only if it finds it totally empty. Otherwise, disappointed, it must withdraw.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 11, August 28, 1912^[9]

As long as the heart remains cluttered with affections for created things, there is no longer room for God's love to enter it fully. Detachment is thus another name for availability: it opens the space that love comes to occupy. That is why Blessed Conchita Cabrera de Armida prayed:

“Work tirelessly to acquire this emptiness, so that Jesus may truly come to rest in you! Let us be empty of all that is not God.” — Blessed Conchita Cabrera de Armida, Life in the Holy Spirit^[10]

For peace and freedom

The disorder of attachments is not only a spiritual obstacle: it is an immediate source of anxiety, here and now. The Imitation of Christ states it almost clinically:

“As soon as a man begins to desire anything in a disordered way, he at once becomes restless within himself. The proud and the covetous never have rest; but the poor and humble in spirit live in abundance of peace.” — The Imitation of Christ, Book I, ch. 6^[11]

Attachment enslaves; detachment liberates. The philosopher and mystic Maurice Zundel overturned the common definition of freedom to show its true mainspring:

“If I am a slave to myself, I am in the worst of slaveries! The only freedom is to be free of oneself.” — Maurice Zundel, Another Look at Man^[12]

Saint Vincent de Paul said the same thing to his Daughters with his habitual good sense: “If we wish to be free, let us mortify our passions; for it is the property of mortification to give rest to the soul, so that it is always content with what happens to it and neither asks for nor refuses anything.”^[13] The detached man is not an impoverished man: he is a free man.

Neither Stoic indifference nor contempt for creatures

The word lends itself to a double misunderstanding that must be set aside from the outset. Christian detachment is not the apathy of the Stoic sage, who numbs himself in order to suffer no more: Christ, detached from all, wept over Jerusalem and at the tomb of Lazarus. Nor is it contempt for creatures, as if the world were evil: God saw that all he had made “was very good” (Gen 1:31). The Catechism recalls that created goods are gifts to be received, not traps to be fled:

“The use of created things […] In creation, God laid a foundation and established laws which remain stable, on which the believer can rely with confidence.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 346^[14]

Detachment therefore bears not on creatures themselves, but on the disorder of our attachment to them. Saint Paul gave the right measure in a balanced formula: those who use this world, “as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31)^[15]. To hold created things with an open hand, not a clenched one.

Detachment is the order of love

Positively, detachment is not the absence of love: it is love restored to its order. Saint Augustine called virtue ordo amoris, the order of love: to love each thing according to its rank, and God above all. To detach oneself is not to stop loving goods, persons, life: it is to stop loving them more than God or in God's place. Fr. Vayssière explained it to a soul eager to rise:

“You want to climb, to fly, to soar? Good. But first unclutter yourself, disengage yourself, lighten your wings. This before that — it is an absolute necessity.” — Fr. Marie-Étienne Vayssière, Consenting to Love^[16]

That is why detachment grows in exact proportion to the love of God: one lets go of a thing only because one has seized upon a better one. Saint Augustine made it a law of spiritual experience: at the sixth degree of the ascent toward Wisdom, the soul purifies the eye by which God can be seen — for God is seen only insofar as one dies to this world, and insofar as one lives here below, one does not see Him^[17].

Detachment of the hand and detachment of the heart

Tradition carefully distinguishes two realities that language confuses. Effective detachment bears on things themselves: one leaves, one gives, one deprives oneself. Affective detachment bears on the heart: one ceases to place one's support and treasure in them. The second is the essential one, for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21)^[18]. One can leave everything and remain attached; one can own little and keep one's soul free.

But neither ever authorizes neglecting the other. A truly detached heart always ends by opening the hand, and the practice of concrete renunciations purifies the heart in return. That is the whole spiritual work: to carry detachment from the outside to the inside, and from the inside to the outside, until the two coincide. Marthe Robin formulated the integral demand thus:

“The complete mortification of the senses, absolute detachment from the created, is indispensable to the soul that wants to attain divine union. […] The created torments and debases; the Spirit of God purifies and sanctifies.” — Venerable Marthe Robin, Journal^[19]

From what must one detach oneself?

Detachment does not concern money alone. The spiritual masters widen its object to everything that can take God's place. Four great domains are classically distinguished, from the most outward to the most intimate:

To these four is added a fifth domain, the subtlest, reserved for advanced souls: detachment from spiritual consolations themselves — no longer seeking God's sweetness, but God alone. That is the summit of the path, treated below.

The bird held by a thread

Why must one detach oneself even from small things? Because a small bond is enough to prevent flight. Saint John of the Cross, the doctor of detachment, gave the most famous image in all of mysticism:

“What does it matter whether the bird is held by a light thread or by a rope? Light though the thread be, the bird remains caught by it as by the rope, and until it breaks it, it cannot take flight.” — Saint John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, ch. 11^[20]

The lesson is harsh and liberating: what counts is not the size of the attachment, but the fact that it holds. A tiny habit, a stubborn whim, a cherished vanity is enough to nail the soul to the ground. That is why detachment is not a single act but a patient work, descending even to the “nothings” to which one clings unawares.

“To come to taste all, desire the taste of nothing”

At the end of the same book, Saint John of the Cross sums up his doctrine of “nothing” (nada) in a series of paradoxical maxims, engraved at the foot of his drawing of the Ascent:

“To come to taste all, desire the taste of nothing. To come to possess all, desire the possession of nothing. To come to be all, desire to be nothing in nothing.” — Saint John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, ch. 13^[21]

The paradox is not a praise of nothingness: it is the logic of total love. Whoever wants the All — God — must stop settling for some something. Jesus said it to Luisa Piccarreta with an almost amused joy:

“Bravo, bravo, my daughter! At last I have found someone who wants nothing. Everyone wants something from me, but not the All — that is, me alone. You, in wanting nothing, want everything. Such is the finesse and cunning of true Love.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 11, February 24, 1912^[22]

The emptiness that calls for fullness

Detachment is therefore not a loss, but an exchange: one lets go of the little to receive the all. Jesus gave Luisa the reason for it through the image of a narrow door:

“My Heart is infinitely great; but the door to enter it is very narrow. No one can come to fill his emptiness, except stripped and simple souls. […] The slightest hindrance, the shadow of an attachment […] keeps them from coming to delight in it.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, May 7, 1899^[23]

It is the same movement Saint Paul describes in his own life: having “lost” all things for Christ, and counting everything else henceforth “as refuse, that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:8)^[24]. Detachment, at bottom, is but another name for the choice of God — preferred, desired, seized above all.

Detachment is not a state one has or has not: it is a growth, going from the duty common to all up to mystical stripping. Five stages can be distinguished, with no watertight partition between them.

Ordering one's affections: everyone's duty

The first detachment is not reserved for monks: it binds every baptized person. The Catechism formulates it as a universal duty, which asks not to leave everything, but to attach oneself to nothing more than to God:

“All Christ's faithful are to direct their affections rightly, lest they be hindered in their pursuit of perfect charity by the use of the things of this world and by an attachment to riches which is contrary to the spirit of evangelical poverty.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2545^[25]

An honest father of a family, a worker, an engaged man can live a real detachment without leaving anything of their state: they need only keep their heart free, holding their goods and joys as received and offered.

Detachment from consolations: the night

Higher on the path comes a trial beginners do not imagine: detaching oneself no longer from coarse goods, but from spiritual sweetness itself. The soul that has tasted prayer, tears, sensible fervor can attach itself to them as to a possession, and seek God's consolations more than the God of consolations. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, at seventeen, had already grasped this extreme point of detachment:

“Let us detach ourselves from earth, let us fly to the mountain of love where lies the beautiful Lily of our souls… Let us detach ourselves from the consolations of Jesus, to attach ourselves to Him!” — Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Letter 105^[26]

Here opens the “night” described by Saint John of the Cross: God withdraws sweetness to purify love and make it rest on Him alone, not on His gifts. Jesus announced it plainly to Elizabeth Kindelmann: “I will give you no consolation that will attach you to earth.”^[27]

The “nothing” of the perfect

At the summit, detachment becomes total: the soul holds to nothing created, not even to itself, but only to God. That is the state Jesus described to Luisa as the condition of His permanent dwelling:

“For me to come and dwell in a soul, the essential thing is that it be totally detached from all things. […] As soon as the soul has stripped itself of everything, I enter it. And together with it, we build a house.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, October 29, 1899^[28]

This “nothing” is not an impoverishment, but entrance into the possession of God — and, in the spirituality of the Divine Will, the threshold of life in the Fiat: Jesus explained to Luisa that it is to the extent that the soul detaches itself from all that is not wholly His that it becomes ever more plunged in His Will^[29].

Beholding Christ stripped bare

First means, source of all the others: contemplating Jesus poor and stripped until one loves Him. One does not detach oneself by willpower, but by love of a greater good glimpsed. Meditating on the manger where the Word has only a crib, the thirty hidden years of Nazareth, the itinerant life “with nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20), and above all the Cross where He is stripped of all, even His garments and the very sense of the Father's presence: that is what makes detachment desirable. Saint Paul sums up the whole secret:

“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ.” — Letter to the Philippians 3:8^[30]

Detachment then ceases to be a loss and becomes a likeness: one strips oneself as the Beloved stripped Himself.

Asking for grace: one does not detach oneself alone

Detachment is first a gift. Trying to tear it out of oneself by sheer force of will leads to pride or discouragement. It must be asked for, and God left to work what we cannot. Jesus reminded Conchita of this: “It is He who cleans His nest, but the soul must let itself be done.”^[31] Man's part is to consent, to desire, to open the hand; God's part is truly to unbind the heart. Saint Catherine of Genoa said it in an extreme formula: God must “consume” man inwardly, and the soul must “let itself be done”^[32].

Saint Ignatius's holy indifference

Saint Ignatius of Loyola gave detachment its most operational formula, at the heart of the Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises: “holy indifference,” which is not coldness but the balance of desire before all that is not the last end:

“We must make ourselves indifferent to all created things […] in such a way that, for our part, we want not health more than sickness, riches more than poverty, honor more than dishonor, a long life more than a short one; and so in all other things, desiring and choosing only what leads us more to the end for which we are created.” — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, no. 23^[33]

Ignatian indifference is not the absence of preference, but the subordination of every preference to God's will: I hold myself equally ready to receive health or sickness, because in all things I seek only Him.

Mortifying small attachments

Since even a light thread prevents flight (Saint John of the Cross), detachment is won in the small daily things, by repeated acts. Saint Vincent de Paul is categorical: “Mortification, like the other virtues, is acquired only by repeated acts.”^[34] It is not about extraordinary feats, but a thousand tiny renunciations: yielding one's comfort, silencing a retort, dropping a whim, not demanding the last satisfaction. Jesus asked it of Sister Léonie-Marie Nastal in almost tender terms:

“From all souls I ask a renunciation of self for what gives pleasure but could be made a sacrifice. It is so little. To a beggar one sometimes gives a penny, whereas souls refuse me even that little.” — Jesus to Sister Léonie-Marie Nastal, I Believed in Love^[35]

Detaching the heart from persons without ceasing to love

Detachment from affections is the most delicate, for it is not about loving less, but about loving in God and not in His place. Saint Teresa of Avila, who loved her friends with an ardent affection, nonetheless counted detachment from all created things among the three things she required of her sisters, together with mutual love and humility^[36]. To love in order is not to harden oneself: it is to stop making a loved one an idol, an absolute, a final security — and to give him back to God in order to find him again in Him, purified and enlarged. Possessive attachment suffocates; detached charity liberates both the one who loves and the one who is loved.

Detaching oneself from self and self-will

The hardest detachment is not that of goods nor even of persons: it is that of self-will. The Imitation notes it shrewdly:

“It is hard to give up one's habits, but it is harder still to bend one's own will.” — The Imitation of Christ, Book I, ch. 11^[37]

Yet everything is decided there, for attachment to self is the root of all the others. Meister Eckhart reduced it to a single movement: “Go out completely from yourself for God, and God will go out completely from Himself for you.”^[38] This detachment from self is not the destruction of the person, but its liberation: the soul stops revolving around its little self to gravitate around God.

Welcoming the detachments one did not choose

Not all detachments are voluntary. Life imposes them — trials, bereavements, failures, illnesses, stripping of every kind — which one does not choose. Received in faith, these wrenchings become the most purifying, for they reach what one truly held to. Jesus said it to Luisa: “A resigned soul is always at peace, and I find my rest in it.”^[39] Accepting what one cannot change, entrusting it to God, making it an offering rather than a revolt: that is turning a suffered loss into a loving detachment.

From detachment to abandonment

Detachment is not an end in itself: it is fulfilled in abandonment. Unbinding oneself from all is not enough; one must still entrust oneself wholly to Him for whom one has been unbound. Dom Vital Lehodey, in Holy Abandonment, and Fr. de Caussade, in Abandonment to Divine Providence, showed that detachment is only the purifying face of one same movement whose filial and restful face is abandonment. Jesus summed it up to Sister Mary of the Trinity in five words: “Leave everything, everything, then let me act.”^[40] On this passage from detachment to trusting surrender, see How to Grow in Abandonment to God.

Insensibility mistaken for virtue

The first counterfeit is the gravest: confusing detachment with hardness of heart. Making oneself insensitive, no longer attaching oneself so as to suffer no more, treating others coldly under the pretext of spirituality — that is not evangelical detachment, it is its opposite. Christ, detached from all, is also the most tender of men: He weeps, He is moved, He loves “with a love of predilection.” True detachment increases the capacity to love instead of extinguishing it, because it purifies love of its selfishness. A heart that hardens has not detached itself: it has shrunk.

The pride of renunciation

More subtle: becoming attached to one's own detachment, taking vanity in one's austerities, comparing oneself with the less fervent. One may then have left everything and cling fiercely to one's image of oneself as a detached soul — which is the most tenacious of attachments. The remedy is humility, which digs detachment down to the root of the self: see How to Grow in Humility.

Detachment as pretext or escape

Third counterfeit: covering with the fine name of detachment a neglect of one's duties. Leaving one's family, fleeing one's responsibilities, neglecting one's work or health while invoking spirituality is not detaching oneself: it is evading. True detachment makes one more present, more faithful, more helpful — not less. Saint Vincent de Paul, the most detached and most active of men, is the living proof.

Secretly holding to one's “nothings”

Last trap, the hardest to flush out: the hidden attachments one does not suspect. A habit, a comfort, a touchiness, a small power, a reputation — so many “light threads” holding the bird. Detachment is a patient work of examination, descending into the corners where the heart has nested unawares. That is why it is never finished here below: there is always one more thread to break.

Freedom and peace of heart

The first fruit of detachment is a freedom nothing else can give. The unbound soul is no longer tossed about by its desires nor crushed by its losses; it rests, because it no longer leans on what passes. “The poor and humble in spirit live in abundance of peace,” says the Imitation^[41]. This peace is not indifference: it is the stability of a heart that has found its center.

Transparency to God's light

The more the soul strips itself, the more God's light passes through it without obstacle. Jesus gave Luisa a luminous image of it:

“I am so proud of souls detached from everything. As they strip themselves, my light invades them and they become transparent as crystal, so that nothing hinders the light of my sun from penetrating them.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, April 26, 1899^[42]

Enlarged charity

Detachment does not end in emptiness, but in a surplus of love. The room made by unbinding is what love comes to occupy. Jesus said it to Luisa: charity can reign fully only in a soul “stripped of everything”^[43]. Far from cooling the heart, detachment enlarges it: it makes one available for God and neighbor, free to serve, to give, to love without return. That is the deep bond between this root and its highest flower, charity.

God as one's all: “God alone suffices”

The ultimate fruit of detachment is that God becomes all. When the heart holds to nothing, it discovers that nothing is lacking to it, because it possesses Him who contains all. Saint Teresa of Avila had written the experience on her breviary bookmark:

“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you; all things pass, God does not change. Patience obtains all; whoever has God lacks nothing: God alone suffices.” — Saint Teresa of Avila, Poem (“Nada te turbe”)^[44]

Marthe Robin said, from the opposite angle, the same thing: “How pitiable is he to whom God is not enough.”^[45] Such is the end of the path: not a man deprived of everything, but a man to whom God suffices — that is, a man fulfilled.

• How to Grow in Evangelical Poverty — the application of detachment to material goods.
• How to Grow in Almsgiving — the fruit of detachment in giving to the poor.
• How to Grow in Temperance — detachment applied to pleasures and sensible desires.
• How to Grow in Chastity — detachment ordered in the desires of the body.
• How to Grow in Abandonment to God — the end of detachment: filial surrender of all to God.
• How to Grow in Humility — detachment from self and self-esteem.
• How to Grow in Charity — the virtue that detachment liberates and enlarges.
• What the Saints Say About Trust — the trust born of a free heart.