Archive

...you have only to stay close to the crucified and your suffering is the best prayer.

If you know how to accept the trials, worries, sufferings, and fatigue arranged by God throughout the days and hours of life, you will practice a lot of asceticism, and you will not have to look for more of it.

Terrible trials are suffered because we don’t understand ourselves, and that which isn’t bad at all but good we think is a serious fault. This lack of knowledge causes the afflictions of many people who engage in prayer; complaints about interior trials, at least to a great extent, by people who have no learning; melancholy and loss of health; and even the complete abandonment of prayer.

Our suffering never makes Him happy. He sends it to us and, as it were, turns His head while so doing, but suffering is a thing that is necessary for us.

What did You possess, my Lord, but trials, sufferings, and dishonor?...In sum, my God, it does not fit those of us who want to be your true children, and hold on to their inheritance, to flee suffering. Your heraldry consists of five wounds.

True spirituality seeks for bitterness rather than sweetness in God, inclines to suffering rather than consolation. It knows that this is to follow Christ and deny self, while the other course is perhaps nothing but seeking oneself in God, which is the very opposite of love.

The soul suffers many trials, for the Lord wants the poor gardener to think that all the trouble he has taken in watering the garden and keeping it alive is lost. Then is the proper time for weeding and rooting out the smaller plants, and this must be done, however small they may be, if they are useless; for we know that no efforts of ours are availing if God withholds from us the water of grace, and we must despise ourselves as nothing and as less than nothing. By doing this we can gain great humility and then the flowers will begin to grow afresh.

If trials are not suffered for God, they are worth nothing; if they are suffered for Him, His Majesty adapts them to our strength. Thus, if we are so afraid of them it is because we are fainthearted.

O Mary, anyone who looks at you is comforted in any anxiety or tribulation or pain, and is victorious over any temptation. Anyone who does not know something about God, let him have recourse to you, O Mary.

Suffering is a great favor. Remember that everything soon comes to an end . . . and take courage. Think of how our gain is eternal.

Softened and humbled by aridities and hardships and by other temptations and trials in which God exercises the soul in the course of this night, individuals become meek toward God and themselves and also toward their neighbor. As a result they no longer become impatiently angry with themselves and their faults or with their neighbor's; neither are they displeased or disrespectfully querulous with God for not making them perfect quickly.

For now, his voice reaches us through words spoken by good people, through listening to spiritual talks, and reading sacred literature. God calls to us in countless little ways all the time. Through illnesses and suffering and through sorrow he calls to us. Through a truth glimpsed fleetingly in a state of prayer he calls to us. No matter how halfhearted such insights may be, God rejoices whenever we learn what he is trying to teach us.