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He wants you to go out from yourself to leave all preoccupations, in order to retire into that solitude which He is choosing for Himself in the depths of your heart. He is always there, even when you do not feel Him. He is waiting for you, to establish with you...an intimate union.

He has borne with many offences and much unworthiness in you, yet these have not sufficed to make Him turn away; is it much to ask that you should sometimes shift your gaze from earthly things to fix it on Him?

May nothing make you waver. Look at Him. He's awaiting you and is filled with infinite love and will make you His bride. He wants to forge with you the most intimate union. He will make you divine, by joining Himself to you. You will live in Jesus amid infinite sweetness, purity, holiness, goodness, amid the love of One who is God.

I have never heard Him speak, but I know that He is within me.

Yet, as is evident through experience, souls who will pass on to so happy and lofty a state as is the union of love must usually remain in these aridities and temptations for a long while no matter how quickly God leads them.

If you want to find a hidden treasure you must enter the hiding place secretly, and once you have discovered it, you will also be hidden just as the treasure is hidden. Since, then, your beloved Bridegroom is the treasure hidden in a field for which the wise merchant sold all his possessions [Mt. 13:44], and that field is your soul, in order to find him you should forget all your possessions and all creatures and hide in the secret inner room of your spirit and there, closing the door behind you (your will to all things), you should pray to your Father in secret [Mt. 6:6]. Remaining hidden with him, you will experience him in hiding, that is, in a way transcending all language and feeling.

There are not two doctrines of St. John of the Cross, one for religious and one for seculars; there is only one, which applies to all Christians indiscriminately and does not require a special state of life, but only a disposition of will, namely the disposition of not wanting to be confined to mediocrity and therefore of not refusing generous renunciation at every privation required for attaining a more intimate union with God.

We need sacrifice, renouncement to our own will to reach complete union with Our Lord.

For, after all the efforts of the soul, it cannot by its unaided labors make itself fitted for union with God in love. God must take it to Himself into His own hands and purify it in the dark fire.

Those who seek to please God without reservation, at all times and in every situation, draw upon themselves the divine gaze and receive from the Sacred Heart of Jesus the greatest affection and care.

He will gaze on you with beautiful, compassionate eyes, and will forget His own grief to solace yours, only because you went to comfort Him, and turned to look at Him.

All Three Persons of the Holy Trinity dwell in the soul that loves Them ‘in truth’ ... keeping Their word. And when the soul has understood its riches, whatever natural or supernatural joy may come to it from creatures or even from God, only calls it to enter within itself, to enjoy the substantial good which it possesses and which is none other than God Himself.