I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.
But true faith must be able to go on even when everything else is taken away from us.
In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.
To really know our ‘nothingness’ we must also love it. And we cannot love it unless we see that it is good. And we cannot see that it is good unless we accept it.
The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.
It is good for the soul to be in solitude for a great part of the time. But if it should seek solitude for its own comfort and consolation, it will have to endure more darkness and more anguish and more trial. Pure prayer only takes possession of our hearts for good when we no longer desire any special light or grace or consolation for ourselves, and pray without any thought of our own satisfaction.
IT is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily; you yourself do not know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is keeping you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is you yourself.
Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them. And.
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.