Archive

But when souls are worn out from many years of meditation and of having sought this Bridegroom, and most weary of worldly things, they sit under the shadow of Truth, they do not seek their comfort or calm or rest anywhere except where they understand they can truly have it. They place themselves under the protection of the Lord; they desire no other.

The soul states that it was able to make this escape because of the strength and warmth gained from loving its Bridegroom in this obscure contemplation. It emphasizes its good fortune in having journeyed to God through this dark night.

When a soul is happy, living in close union with God, so as to make its life an intimate friendship with the Divine Master, when it knows how to find Him in its inmost depths, then it is never lonely again, and it feels the need of solitude in order to enjoy the Presence of the Guest it adores. You must give Him His rightful place in your heart, which He has made capable of loving so passionately; if you realized how good He is, how He is all love!

Lord, if you tell me to love others just as You love them, then You must love them in me and through me. So the closer my union with You, the more I love all my sisters without distinction.

I have understood that the thing that separates me most from God is my pride. I propose to be humble. Without humility the other virtues are hypocrisy. ... Humility gains us similarity to Christ, peace of soul, holiness and intimate union with God.

Since this flame is a flame of divine life, it wounds the soul with the tenderness of God's life, and it wounds and stirs it so deeply as to make it dissolve in love. What the bride affirmed in the Song of Songs is fulfilled in the soul. She was so moved that her soul melted, and so she says: As soon as he spoke my soul melted [Sg. 5:6]. For God's speech is the effect he produces in the soul.

I long to behold the light of his gaze.
Oh! What splendor must shine in his eyes!
In contemplating this Only Begotten of the Father
I will have the Three and I will have all of Heaven!
He will make his light shine in my soul,
He will purify me in divine flames.

O my adored Word
Luminous Beauty,
Look upon me!

It seems to the soul that the entire universe is a sea of love in which it is engulfed, for conscious of the living point or center of love within itself, it is unable to catch sight of the boundaries of this love.

...it is supreme ignorance for the soul to think that it will be able to pass to this high estate of union with God if first it void not the desire of all things, natural and supernatural, which may hinder it...for there is the greatest possible distance between these things and that which comes to pass in this estate, which is naught else than transformation in God.

Love produces such likeness in this transformation of lovers that one can say each is the other and both are one. The reason is, that in the union and transformation of love, each gives possession of self to the other, and each leaves and exchanges self for the other. Thus each one lives in the other and is the other, and both are one in the transformation of love.

Oh how desirable is this union with God's will! Happy is the soul that has reached it. Such a soul will live tranquilly in this life, and in the next as well. Nothing in earthly events afflicts it unless it finds itself in some danger of losing God or sees that He is offended: neither sickness, nor poverty, nor death...for the soul sees well that the Lord knows what He is doing better than it knows what it is desiring.

The Eucharist is truly the sacrament of union and at the same time it is the clearest and most convincing proof that God calls us and pleads with us to come to intimate union with Himself.