Interior Life

"God has promised that we will always have access to all the help we need...If He permits us to experience great temptations or setbacks, the Lord will give us still greater help to overcome them. Then those things that seem to retard our struggle for holiness, or even make succeeding in it seem impossible, will become the cause of spiritual progress...Lord, we say to him in our prayer, make us thirst for you even more intensely than the man dying in the desert thirsts for water!" (p. 139)

"There are various reasons that cause us to make scant progress in the interior life, and even to lose ground and give way to discouragement. However, these reasons can be reduced to just a few: carelessness, negligence in little things connected with service to God and friendship with Him; drawing back from the sacrifices He asks of us." (p.140)

--from In Conversation With God, Vol.3

The Kingdom at Hand

The Christian life is first of all a personal relationship between each one of us and God. I believe...that the Christian life is essentially a friendship, a love, that each one of us has been called by his name, and that at the beginning of every conversion there is this encounter...an encounter with an adorable being, demanding, tenacious, whom nothing discourages, and to whom we prefer so many creatures whom we shortly forsake or who forsake us. But he is always there, never so close to us as when, we believe him to be absent, awaiting his hour which, in the case of many men, is unfortunately the last, when there is no longer any possibility of betrayal.
-Magnificat: January 23, page 323

Unity

Disharmony is the great curse of mankind. It is present to some degree in all institutions and human relationships. This is true even of the Church. But Christ prayed that all his people might be one (Jn 17:11). Let us be people of unity and reconciliation in the Chruch, in the world, and in all our relationships.
-Magnificat, 1/22/11 pg 311

Where is your God?

"Deep calls to deep in the roar of your torrents. All your waves and breakers sweep over me. At dawn may the Lord bestow faithful love that I may sing praise through the night, praise to the God of my life."
--Psalm 42: 8-9

The answer to those who reproach the psalmist with "Where is your God?" -- He is busy, in the depths of my soul. He is about a work in me that my intellect would only hinder, so he goes deep where the mind cannot follow, and there He restores my soul. Like Job, I can know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end He will reign upon the earth. Herein lies my hope and therefor I will praise Him.

Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, in The Mystery of God’s Word
p. 67:…”reflecting on, or contemplating, the Word (the fixing of our gaze,” of lingering over the Word). In this we assimilate the Word of God, we interiorize it, we enter into living, personal contact with it, we allow it to permeate us through and through, to illuminate our entire interior universe with its light: our thoughts, affections, and desires.”

p. 72: “All the Scriptures were written for this purpose: that human beings might grasp how much God loves them and grasp it so as to become inflamed with love for him.”

p. 72: “Knowledge of God without knowledge of self leads to presumption; knowledge of self without knowledge of God leads to despair.”

p.72: “a continual purifying of the heart is needed for us to welcome the Word.”

Acts 11: Peter had to answer to the other Jews for going to Cornelius, a gentile, and sharing the Gospel with him and his household. I was struck by the way the Lord prepared Peter for what was coming -- so that he wouldn't miss it. For thousands of years, the Lord had been forming a people. Now he had Peter extend that formation to gentiles. Jesus had promised that the disciples would do greater things than He did -- and here, through Peter, He opened the Kingdom to the whole world.