I know no greater joy than to discover some weakness in myself that I did not realize before. I often taste this joy and shall always have it when God gives me his light when I am examining my conscience. I firmly believe, and in this I find joy, that God guides those who give themselves up to his leading and that he takes care of the least things that concern them.
SAINT CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE Retreat Notes, Lyons, 1674
The dogma of the Holy Trinity is not an abstraction, mere information regarding God's “inner life”—kind of God to give us, but quite irrelevant in our earthly existence. No! It is a stunning blissful experience and is our experience, too, whether we attend to it or not. The God who created us is the God who came to us in Jesus Christ to take us back to his heart, and the same God, as the spirit of the Risen Lord is with us now. It was the actual experience of this threefold presence of God as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, that led our spiritual forefathers, guided, as promised, by the Holy Spirit, to infer that in some mysterious way, God is triune in nature. The Church in her liturgy is always holding up to our gaze the mystery of the triune God. She holds it up like a precious jewel against the light and turns it now this way, now that as she celebrates her mysteries or preaches the word, and so we may see it ever anew.
RUTH BURROWS, OCD Love Unknown, Ch. 2
When our lives are filled with a lot of excitement we can easily forget about God. We lose our hunger and thirst for God. In his lengthy discourse on the prayer, “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me,” John Cassian points out that the “poverty" of this phrase will keep us in close contact with God. In other words, we do not need a lot of diversity in our prayer. We do not need a lot of information in our reading. Instead, what may seem like a few poor words can form our hearts in the ways of prayer—“the poverty of the phrase." Such poverty keeps our minds sharp and hungry for more. It is a fasting of the mind, not the stomach.
BRENDAN FREEMAN, OCSO Come and See: The Monastic Way for Today
The first Cistercians began a manner of living which has through the ages attracted, sustained and brought to a happy conclusion the lives of tens of thousands of monastic men and women. The Cistercian Patrimony is not a matter of lifeless stones, but a living reality incarnate in the lives and labors of innumerable brothers and sisters and expressed explicitly by a substantial body of doctrine developed by Cistercian authors of all centuries. We inherit from the past not only buildings and artifacts, not only a lifestyle that many romantically believe has changed little from the Middle Ages, but a tradition of life communicated in a thousand humble ways from one generation to the next. Beneath the Cistercian reality lays a network of beliefs, values and core practices that embody the energy of the charism. The heart of the Cistercian Patrimony is a philosophy of life as validly applied to the 21st century as to the 12th.
MICHAEL CASEY “Toward the Cistercian Millennium,”Tjurunga 54 (May 1998)
To be human is to be fundamentally a gift, for each and every human being bears in a unique manner the imprint of the God who created them in freedom and love. Nowhere is the character of that gift more apparent than in our own human capacity for freedom and love, not simply in terms of our earthly relationships but also in our openness to perfect fulfillment in union with the God whose likeness we bear. Such fulfillment has been made possible for us by Jesus Christ.
JOE EGAN The Godless Delusion (Peter Lang, 2009)
Having read many books containing different methods of reaching God, I felt that they would confuse me rather than help me find what I was looking for, which was to become completely God’s. This led me to resolve to give all for the All. I renounced, for love of Him, everything that was not Him, and I began to live as if there was nothing but He and I in the world.
BROTHER LAWRENCE OF THE RESURRECTION The Practice of the Presence of God
No man, wise in his own opinion, because he has studied all the sciences and is learned in external wisdom, will ever penetrate God's mysteries or see them unless he first humbles himself and becomes foolish in his heart, repudiating his self-opinion together with his acquirements of learning. For a man who acts thus and follows with undaunted faith those who are wise in things Divine, is guided by them and with them enters into the city of the living God, and, taught and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, sees and knows things which no one else can see or know. Thus he becomes taught of God.
ST. SIMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN Philokalia, Practical and Theological Precepts