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The more a person lives recollected in the interior of his soul, the stronger is that radiation which he sheds around him and which draws other souls into his circle.

And how right the devil is to direct his attacks so that the soul give up prayer! The traitor knows that he has lost the soul that practices prayer perseveringly and that all the falls he helps it to take assist it afterward, through the goodness of God, to make a great leap forward in the Lord's service.

For love is the genuine fruit of prayer when prayer is rooted in humility.

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

Love does not consist in great sweetness of devotion, but in a fervent determination to strive to please God in all things, in avoiding, as far as possible, all that would offend Him, and in praying for the increase of the glory and honor of His Son and for the growth of the Catholic Church. These are the signs of love; do not imagine that it consists in never thinking of anything but God, and that if your thoughts wander a little all is lost.

And even in sickness itself and these other occasions the prayer is genuine when it comes from a soul that loves to offer the sickness up and accept what is happening and be conformed to it and to the other thousand things that happen.

Hence, don't pay any attention to the fears they raise or to the picture of the dangers they paint for you...Should anyone tell you that prayer is dangerous, consider him the real danger and run from him. Don't forget this counsel, for perhaps you will need it. There will be danger in not having humility and the other virtues. But that the way of prayer be a way of danger — God would never will that.  It seems the devil has invented these fears, and so he has been skillful, apparently, in making some who have practiced prayer fall away.

Now I ask You, Lord, not to abandon me at any time in my recollection, for I am a squanderer of my soul.

I imagine her passing by, so beautiful, so calm and so majestic, so absorbed in recollection of the Word of God within her. Like Him, her prayer was always this: "Ecce. Here I am." Who? "The servant of the Lord," the lowliest of His creatures: she, His Mother! Her humility was so real, for she was always forgetful of self, free from all anxiety.

Don't imagine that, if you had a great deal of time, you would spend more of it in prayer. Get rid of that idea; it is no hindrance to prayer to spend your time well.

...my prayer is quite powerless, but I possess within me the Holy One of God, the Great Supplicant, and that is the prayer I am offering...

Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation.