One doesn’t need to be unhappy when life takes this or that joy away that one thought was indispensable. One doesn’t have to despair when this or that success fails to occur or when our plans are not realized. We become rich through giving, fulfilled through renunciation, joyous through sacrifice, loved through loving. When we become selfless, we become free.
– Karl Rahner
Jesus wanted to speak about the life of the Spirit in us, he used the figure of a gushing
spring. It is like living water that must become in us, a spring that wells up to eternal life (John 4:14). Prayer is that deep spring in us. Actually it was there all along as the breath of the Holy Spirit who was actively and unceasingly praying within us. We did not notice it. Without knowing it, we had piled up numerous stones around that spring . . . We must be very careful, for it could well be precisely our efforts that form the stones obstructing the natural gushing of the spring without our knowing it. In order to pray more and better we must often do less, let go of more things, give up numerous good intentions, and be content to yield to the inner pressure of the Spirit the moment he bubbles up in us and tries to win us over and take us in tow.
– Father Andre Louf, O.C.S.O
St. Augustine. . . describes very beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope. He defines prayer as an exercise of desire. Man was created for greatness, for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched. He then uses a very beautiful image to describe this process of enlargement and preparation of the human heart. ‘Suppose that God wishes to fill you with honey (a symbol of God’s tenderness and goodness); but if you are full of vinegar, where will you put the honey?’ The vessel, that is your heart, must first be enlarged and then cleansed. . .This requires hard work and is painful, but in this way alone do we become suited to that for which we are destined.
– Pope Benedict XVI
If you consider the poor in the light of faith, you will observe that they are taking the place of the Son of God who chose to be poor . . . Christ made himself theservant of the poor and shared their poverty. He went so far as to say that he would consider every deed which either helps or harms the poor as done for or againsthimself. Since God surely loves the poor, he also loves those who love the poor. That is why we hope that God will love us for the sake of the poor . . . Therefore, wemust try to be stirred by our neighbors’ worries and distress. We must beg God to pour into our hearts sentiments of pity and compassion and to fill them again and again with these dispositions . . . Charity is certainly greater than any rule. Moreover, all rules must lead to charity. With renewed devotion, then, we must serve the poor, especially outcasts and beggars.
– St. Vincent de Paul
I will live in the present moment and fill it with love. A straight line is made of millions of little points, one united with the other. My life, too, is made of millions of seconds and minutes united one with the other. If I arrange every single point perfectly, the line will be straight. If I live every minute perfectly, my life will be holy. The road of hope is paved with little steps of hope. The life of hope is made of brief minutes of hope . . .Every minute I want to sing with the whole Church – Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
– Father Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan
If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence, like the sunlight, will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God … More than all things, love silence. It is fruitful in a way that words cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this ‘something’ that is born of silence.
– Isaac of Niniveh
In his ‘Final Testament’ to his brothers, St. Francis of Assisi taught that part of conversion involves ‘leaving the world.’ He said, ‘I tarried for a little while, and then I finally left the world.’ Most of us are still tarrying. We haven’t left the world, and we don’t want to. We’ve partly embraced our Christian vocation, but we really haven’t immersed ourselves in Jesus Christ. In fact, sometimes we belong more to the world than to the kingdom of God’¦Many of us spend a good deal of our lives accumulating stuff. What the ‘stuff’ is will differ from person to person. Yet at the end of our lives, it’s all finally the same junk. It piles up in bookcases, in garages, in boxes in the attic, in the secret places of our souls. As life’s evening sets in, we see the need to begin to detach. The things we’ve accumulated are distractions. They should become less and less important. We need to strip them away – the layers of our life – until, at the very end, all that is left is God and us.
– Archbishop Charles Chaput
September 23 – Feast Day of St. Pio of Pietrelcina
O Lord, we ask for boundless confidence and trust in your Divine Mercy, and the courage to accept the crosses and sufferings which bring immense goodness to our souls and that of your Church. Help us to love you with a pure and contrite heart, and to humble ourselves beneath your cross, as we climb the mountain of holiness, carrying our cross that leads to heavenly glory. May we receive you with great faith and love in Holy Communion, and allow you to act in us as you desire for your greater glory.
– St. Pio of Pietrelcina
The Word of God is not a word to apply in our daily lives at some later date; it is a word to heal us through, and in our listening, here and now. The questions therefore are: How does God come to me as I listen to the Word? Where do I discern the healing hand of God touching me through the Word? How is my sadness, my grief and my mourning being transformed at this very moment? Do I sense the fire of God’s love purifying my heart and giving me new life? These questions lead me to the sacrament of the Word, the sacred place of God’s real presence.
– Henri Nouwen
Let us remind ourselves over and over again that holiness has to do with very ordinary things: truthfulness, courtesy, kindness, gentleness, consideration for others, contentment with our lot, honesty and courage in the face of life, reliability, dutifulness. . .If we were to offer advice to those who want to advance. . .it would be to set the compass, so to speak; to aim at this gathering up of the self so as to be able to give that self to God. This has nothing to do with a psychic awareness, it happens in day to day life. It involves constant watchfulness for the call of God so as to answer with an immediate ‘yes.’ We miss countless opportunities when he is there offering himself because we don’t notice him, we are not really looking for him. This is where our attention should be – the whole of it – on noticing where he is, what he is asking now, not on spiritual states, stages, what happens to us when we are at prayer, what we feel of God and all the rest of it. What matters is that at every moment of our life we are there, waiting, receptive.
– Sister Ruth Burrows, O.C.D.
