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It is in prayer that the soul learns to know Jesus and thus to love him. Since love cannot be satisfied with difference but with equality, the result is union in similarity.

I tell you, Sisters, so that you will see the mercy of our Lord and how His Majesty does not abandon the one who desires to serve Him.

Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds.

In truth, it is impossible that a heart which can find rest only in contemplation of the Tabernacle-and yours is such, you tell me- could so far offend Our Lord as not to be able to receive Him. . . . What does offend Jesus, what wounds Him to the Heart, is want of confidence.

The door by which we can enter this castle is prayer. It is absurd to think that we can enter Heaven without first entering our own souls -- without getting to know ourselves, and reflecting upon the wretchedness of our nature and what we owe to God, and continually imploring His mercy.

Who can free himself from the lowly manners and limitations if You do not lift him to Yourself, my God, in purity of love? How will a man begotten and nurtured in lowliness rise up to You, Lord, if You do not raise him with Your hand which made him?

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].

The poverty of the Carmelite is very great. She can possess nothing, and this is an assurance that her whole capacity for possessing is filled with God alone. By being poor she becomes more like her divine Spouse, who did not have a place to lay His head. The Carmelite possesses God alone.

Rather than continually dwelling on her misery and worthlessness, she merely let all thought of self fall away before the infinite majesty of God; and truly the most profitable and genuine way of despising self is to forget oneself altogether.

from God is Love

Do not let your weakness make you unhappy. When, in the morning, we feel no courage or strength for the practice of virtue, it is really a grace: it is the time to 'lay the axe to the root of the trees,' Matt. 3:10 relying upon Jesus alone.

As soon as natural things are driven out of the enamored soul, the divine are naturally and supernaturally infused since there can be no void in nature.

Many of these beginners have also at times great spiritual avarice. They will be found to be discontented with the spirituality which God gives them; and they are very disconsolate and querulous because they find not in spiritual things the consolation that they would desire.