To know how to display our miseries before God is to draw down grace; never forget that. If a soul, even one far advanced in virtue, ceased to regard her own misery and to take complacency in the gifts she has received, she would infallibly fall. For you, my dear child, learn to say with Saint Paul, “Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
BLESSED COLUMBA MARMION Union With God
It is better to keep silent and to be, rather than to speak but not to be. One who truly possesses Christ's words can also hear his silence in order to be perfect… nothing is hidden from the Lord but our very secrets are close to him. Let us do everything in him who dwells in us so that we may become his temples.
IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH Epistle to the Ephesians, 15
Continue to pray as you feel drawn, but do not worry about it, for worry comes from self-love. You must abandon yourself to the leading of God with no other intention than that of pleasing him, and when you know that you have this intention deep in your heart, you must not waste time and reflecting about yourself and about the degree of virtue you have attained; occupy yourself with him whom you love and bother very little about yourself.
ST. CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE Letter 135
Reading one and the same word of Scripture, one person is nourished by history only, another looks for the typical meaning, another by means of this same meaning reaches towards the contemplative meaning. Most often, these three dimensions are found there at the same time… In this way the words of God advance at the pace of the reader.
GREGORY THE GREAT Homilies on Ezekiel, I
No one can see God and live. It is true: I saw him and died. Nothing could again satisfy me except that interior wilderness where life is simply God to me and I to God.
SR. MAUREEN McCABE, OCSO I Am the Way
I believe in the sun, even when it isn't shining
I believe in love, even when I feel it not
I believe in God, even when He is silent
AN ANONYMOUS PRISONER Written on a Nazi concentration camp wall
It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one's hunger and sleep, one's cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying, I live as my fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else's. I must learn gradually to forget program and artifice.
THOMAS MERTON