Archive

Trials help greatly to detach us from earth. They make us look to God, rather than to this world.

For Christ desire to enter into complete nakedness, emptiness and poverty in everything.

One thing is certain, that we are living in our present time and place in order to accomplish our salvation and that of those entrusted to us.

The Apostle would have us keep silence, for in silence he tells us to work. As the Prophet also makes known to us: Silence is the way to foster holiness. Elsewhere he says: Your strength will lie in silence and hope.

I know I am being sustained and herein lies my tranquility and security- not the conscious security of the man who is on firm ground with his own strength, but the sweet and beautiful security of a child upheld by a strong arm- which in practice is a security not less reasonable. Could you call that child reasonable who would live in constant fear that its mother would let it fall?

In order that love be true and friendship endure, the wills of the friends must be in accord.

Since we are all members of one body, inasmuch as we have an abundance of divine life, we can communicate it in the great body of the Church.

His blood is the curtain through which we enter into the Holiest of Holies, the Divine Life. In baptism and in the sacrament of reconciliation, his blood cleanses us of our sins, opens our eyes to eternal light, our ears to hearing God's word. It opens our lips to sing his praise, to pray in expiation, in petition, in thanksgiving, all of which are but varying forms of adoration, i.e., of the creature's homage to the Almighty and All-benevolent One.

When the soul is so deeply rooted in Him, the divine sap flows freely through it, and everything that is imperfect, commonplace, unspiritual, is destroyed ... the soul that is thus divested of itself and clothed with Jesus Christ, need no longer fear anything either from relations with the external world or difficulties from within, since far from being a hindrance, these things only root it more firmly in its love for its Master.

The fly that clings to honey hinders its flight, and the soul that allows itself attachment to spiritual sweetness hinders its own liberty and contemplation.

It seems to me that the weakest soul, even the one that is most blameworthy, is the one that has the best grounds for hope. By forgetting itself and throwing itself into the arms of God, it glorifies Him and gives Him more joy than by all its falling back upon self, and all the self-examination that makes it live within its infirmities, while all the time it possesses at the centre of itself a Saviour who wills to purify it every moment.

Always love prayer, and when I say prayer, I don't mean so much imposing on yourself a lot of vocal prayers to be recited every day, as much as that elevation of the soul towards God through all things that establishes us in a kind of continual communion with the Holy Trinity by quite simply doing everything in Their presence.