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There is a Being who is Love and who desires to have us live with Him. Oh! It is delightful! He is there, keeping me company, helping me to suffer, making me rise above my suffering to rest in Him. Do as I do, and you will see how everything becomes transformed.

...He brought about the reconciliation and union of the human race with God through grace.  The Lord achieved this...at the moment in which he was most annihilated... The journey, then, does not consist in consolations, delights, and spiritual feelings, but in the living death of the cross, sensory and spiritual, exterior and interior.

What God communicates to the soul in this intimate union is totally beyond words. One can say nothing about it just as one can say nothing about God Himself that resembles Him.

...Until slumber comes to the appetites through the mortification of sensuality, and until this very sensuality is stilled in such a way that the appetites do not war against the spirit, the soul will not walk out to genuine freedom, to the enjoyment of union with its Beloved.

Mark well, however, that self-knowledge is indispensable, even for those whom God takes to dwell in the same mansion with Himself. Nothing else, however elevated, perfects the soul which must never seek to forget its own nothingness. Let humility be always at work, like the bee at the honeycomb, or all will be lost. But, remember, the bee leaves its hive to fly in search of flowers and the soul should sometimes cease thinking of itself to rise in meditation on the grandeur and majesty of its God. It will learn its own baseness better thus than by self-contemplation, and will be freer from the reptiles which enter the first room where self-knowledge is acquired.

During these painful times when you feel a terrible void, think how He is enlarging the capacity of your soul so that it can receive Him, making it, as it were, infinite just as He is infinite. So, as far as your will is concerned, try to remain perfectly joyous beneath the hand that is crucifying you ... look upon each pain as a token of love coming to you directly from God, in order that He may unite you to Him.

Just as the angels in heaven incessantly sing His praises, so does a Carmelite echo those praises here on earth, whether near to the tabernacle where God who is Love lives imprisoned, or in the intimate depths of her soul's heaven, where faith tells her God dwells.  Our vocation's objective is love, the greatest thing a human heart can possess.

Since our Lord dwells in our souls, His prayer is ours.

The darkness that leads to God is, as we already know, faith. It is the only means that leads to union because it sets God before our eyes as he is: as infinite, as triune. Faith resembles God in that both blind the intellect and appear to it as darkness. "The greater one's faith the closer is one's union with God."

There is a vocation to suffer with Christ and thereby to cooperate in His redemptive work. If we are united to the Lord, we are members of the Mystical Body of Christ; Christ continues to live and to suffer in His members and the suffering borne in union with His is His suffering, integrated and made fruitful in His great redemptive work.

How serious life is:  each minute is given us in order to "root" us deeper in God, as Saint Paul says, so the resemblance to our divine Model may be more striking, the union more intimate.  But to accomplish this plan, which is that of God Himself, here is the secret: forget self, give up self, ignore self, look at the Master, look only at Him, accept as coming directly from His love both joy and suffering...

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.