Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment.
The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings – by which man becomes one with God.
That is the trouble with all introverts: not that they look within but that they are obsessed with “looking within” and afraid to do anything else. Afraid that if they stop looking they will disintegrate.
God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But.
AN ELDER was asked by a certain soldier if God would forgive a sinner. And he said to him: Tell me, beloved, if your cloak is torn, will you throw it away? The soldier replied and said: No. I will mend it and put it back on. The elder said to him: If you take care of your cloak, will God not be merciful to His own image?
And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.
If what most people take for granted were really true – if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now. If.
As a matter of fact, it is often harder to manifest the good that is in us than the evil.
Indeed, too often the weakest thing about our faith is the illusion that our faith is strong, when the “strength” we feel is only the intensity of emotion or of sentiment, which have nothing to do with real faith.
The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves.
Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this.
It does no good to use big words to talk about Christ. Since I seem incapable of talking about him in the language of a child, I have reached the point where I can scarcely talk about him at all. All my words fill me with shame.
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.