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Thursday, November 14, 2024

Our knowledge is piecemeal. When our will and action build on it alone, they cannot achieve a perfect structure. Nor can that knowledge, because it does not have complete power over the self and often collapses before reaching the goal. And so this inner shaping power that is in bondage strains toward a light that will guide more surely, and a power that will free it and give it space. This is the light and the power of divine grace.

— St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein)

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Good works wrought in the season of spiritual dryness and hardness are like the freshness of the winter morning. What we then do for God in dryness of spirit is most precious in His eyes. It is then that we acquire abundant virtues and graces, and what we achieve with toil and labor is in general better, more perfect and lasting than what we acquire in spiritual sweetness.

— St. John of the Cross

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Let them trust in the mercy of God and not at all in themselves, and they will see how His Majesty brings them from the dwelling places of one stage to these of another and settles them in a land where these wild animals cannot touch or tire them, but where they themselves will bring all these animals into subjection and scoff at them.

— St. Teresa of Avila

Sunday, September 22, 2024

I saw that He was a man, even though He was God; that He wasn't surprised by human weaknesses; that He understands our miserable make-up, subject to many falls on account of the first sin which He came to repair. I can speak with Him as with a friend, even though He is Lord.

— St. Teresa of Avila

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

...He brought about the reconciliation and union of the human race with God through grace. The Lord achieved this...at the moment in which he was most annihilated... The journey, then, does not consist in consolations, delights, and spiritual feelings, but in the living death of the cross, sensory and spiritual, exterior and interior.

— St. John of the Cross

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

After God places these three last kinds of good in the soul, he no longer remembers her former ugliness and sin, as he declares through Ezekiel [Ez. 18:22], for on account of these goods she is very agreeable to him. And once he has blotted out this sin and ugliness, he no longer reproaches her for it, or fails to impart more favors, since he never judges a thing twice [Na. 1:9].

— St. John of the Cross

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