One bird sits still Watching the work of God:.
Difference between a vocation and a category. Those who fulfill their vocation to sanctity – or who are fulfilling it – are by that very fact unaccountable. They do not fit into categories. If you use a category in speaking of them you have to qualify statement at once, as if they also belonged to some completely different category. In actual fact, they are in no category, they are particular themselves...
Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God.
My true personality will be fulfilled in the Mystical Christ in this one way above all, that through me, Christ and His Spirit will be able to love you and all men and God the Father in a way that would be possible in no one else. Love.
Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason.
Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.
As soon as you are really alone you are with God.
The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love.
The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our nature by charity.
If in the men who are supposed to be good they only see a “virtue” which is effectively less vital and less interesting than their own vices they will conclude that virtue has no meaning and will cling to what they have although they hate it.
THE most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is the more he is convinced of his own infallibility.
It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is and evermore shall be.
Free will is not given to us merely as a firework to be shot off into the air. There are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation upon us. That is like saying that one is richer if he throws money out the window than if he spends it.
We live as spiritual men when we live as men seeking God.
My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom – still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: “Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.” By.
Why did Christ become Man if not to save men by uniting them mystically with God through His own Sacred Humanity?
ONE of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.
In an age where there is much talk about “being yourself” I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather it seems to me that when one is too intent on “being himself” he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow.
The Mass is a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice, not in the sense of an exterior commemoration, but as a living and supremely efficacious re-presentation of that sacrifice, pouring out into our hearts the redemptive power of the Cross and the grace of the resurrection, which enables us to live in God.
Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.