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I've never acted like Pilate, who refused to listen to the truth. I've always said to God: O my God, I really want to listen to You; I beg You to answer me when I say humbly: What is truth? Make me see things as they really are. Let nothing cause me to be deceived.

A soul united to Jesus and identified with him can do everything. It seems to me that this can be reached only by prayer.

When one cannot put oneself right by speaking, it is better to have recourse to prayer and silence; and thus to keep one's peace alone with God.

Consider now what your Master says next: "Who art in the Heavens." Do you suppose it matters little what Heaven is and where you must seek your most holy Father? I assure you that for minds which wander it is of great importance not only to have a right belief about this but to try to learn it by experience, for it is one of the best ways of concentrating the mind and effecting recollection in the soul.

Be extremely careful for the love of the Lord not to be tricked into giving up prayer.

Prayer is a repose, a relaxation. One must come in total simplicity to the One whom one loves, holding oneself near to Him as a small child in its mother’s arms, allowing one’s heart to go out ...

How I pray that you will know and love God. Don't imagine you have to become a nun to do this. In the world there are souls who love and serve Him.

My love discovers the charms
Of Your Face adorned with tears.
I smile through my own tears
When I contemplate Your sorrows...
Your beauty, which You know how to veil,
Discloses for me all its mystery...
Leave in me the Divine impress
Of Your Features...

Always love prayer, and when I say prayer, I don't mean so much imposing on yourself a lot of vocal prayers to be recited every day, as much as that elevation of the soul towards God through all things that establishes us in a kind of continual communion with the Holy Trinity by quite simply doing everything in Their presence.

When I see souls very earnest in trying to understand the prayer they have and very sullen when they are in it- for it seems they don't dare let their minds move or stir lest a bit of their spiritualdelight and devotion be lost- it makes me realize how little they understand of the way by which union is attained.

Seeing the silence which reigns in His creature, observing how it is wholly recollected in its interior solitude, the Creator greatly desires its beauty. He leads it into the immense, infinite solitude, into that spacious place of which the Psalmist sings, which is His very self. ‘I will enter into the powers of the Lord’.

The God I serve is a living God... A life of prayer is the essence of the Carmelite vocation; the heart to heart communion that never ends, because when one loves, one no longer belongs to oneself but to the Beloved, and so lives more in Him than in oneself.