Archive

It is in the effects and deeds following afterward that one discerns the true value of prayer.

Contemplation is perceived more frequently in the will under the form of love, than in the intellect under the form of knowledge.

Think how Our Lady must have felt when, after the Incarnation, she possessed within her the Incarnate Word, the gift of God! In what depths of silence, of recollection, of adoration, she must have lived in the centre of her soul, in order to embrace that God whose Mother she was! He is in us. Let us keep close to Him in that silence, that love of the Virgin Mother.

God deliver us from spiritual people who are so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, come what may. It would be a bad business for us if we could not seek God until we were dead to the world. Neither Magdalene, nor the woman of Samaria, nor the Canaanite woman was dead to the world when she found him.

To what a height of glory we are called! I understand that silence, the recollection of the saints, who could no longer emerge from their contemplation. The good God led them to the summit of the mountain, where union between Himself and the soul that has become His bride is consummated.

During mental prayer...remain before God like a poor, mute paralytic at the door of a rich man.

He teaches during the brief moments we spend in prayer; however lukewarm these moments may be, God esteems them highly.

In contemplation God teaches the soul very quietly and secretly, without its knowing how, without the sound of words, and without the help of any bodily or spiritual faculty, in silence and quietude, in darkness to all sensory and natural things.

Who can lose confidence? For the Lord endured so much with me only because I desired and strove to have some place and time in order that He might be with me. Prayer is the door to favors as great as those He granted me.

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.

That is the whole life of Carmel; to live in Him, then, all sacrifices, all immolations become divine, for through everything the soul sees Him whom it loves and everything leads it to Him; it is a continual heart to heart exchange! You see that you can already be a Carmelite in your heart. Love silence and prayer for this is the essence of the life of Carmel. Ask the Queen of Carmel to teach you to adore Jesus in profound recollection.

Our life is the life of heaven. St John of the Cross has said that the contemplative has no task here below that she will not have in heaven. The difference is that on earth that task is done in the obscurity of faith; in heaven there will be no veil between God and us.