THE DAILY GOSPEL

So that nothing may draw me out of this beautiful silence within, I must always maintain the same dispositions, the same solitude, the same withdrawal, the same stripping of self! If my desires, my fears, my joys or my sorrows, if all the movements proceeding from these “four passions” are not perfectly directed to God, I will not be solitary: there will be noise within me. There must be peace, sleep of the powers, “the unity of being.” “Listen, my daughter, lend your ear, forget your people and your father’s house, and the King will become enamored of your beauty.” (Ps 44[45]:11-12)… To forget “your people” is difficult, I think, for this people is everything which is, so to speak, part of us: our feelings, our memories, our impressions, etc.… when the soul has made this break, when it is free from all that, the King is enamored of its beauty… The Creator, seeing the beautiful silence which reigns in His creature, and gazing on her wholly recollected in her interior solitude… leads her into this immense, infinite solitude, into this “spacious place” sung of by the prophet (Ps 17[18]:20), which is nothing else but Himself… “I will lead her into solitude and speak to her heart.” (Hos 2:16) The soul has entered into this vast solitude in which God will make Himself heard I “His word,” St. Paul says, “is living and active, and more penetrating than a two-edged sword: extending even to the division of soul and spirit, even of joints and marrow. “(Heb 2:16) It is His word then that will directlv achieve the work of stripping in the soul… But it is not enough just to listen to this word, we must keep it! (Jn 14:23) And it is in keeping it that the soul will be “sanctified in the truth,” (Jn 17:17) and that is the desire of the Master… To the one who keeps His word has He not made this promise: “My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home in him”? (Jn 14:23) It is the whole Trinity who dwells in the soul that loves Him in truth, that is, by keeping His word.

maronite readings – rosary,team

I was distancing myself more and more from you, my Lord and my life. My life, too, was beginning to become a death, or rather it was already death in your sight. And yet, within that state of death, you upheld me… All faith had gone but my respect and esteem remained intact. You showed me further graces, O my God: you preserved the attraction for study in me, for serious reading, beautiful things, a revulsion for vice and ugliness. I did evil yet I neither approved nor loved it… You granted me that vague uneasiness of a bad conscience, which though it may be asleep is not altogether dead. I have never felt that same sadness, lassitude, unease except then. Oh my God, was it then your gift? How far I was from doubting it! How good you are! And while, by this invention of your love, you prevented my soul from drowning altogether, you kept my body safe: for if I had died then I should have been in hell… Those dangers of the journey, great and various as they were, from which you enabled me to come out as if by a miracle! That unchanging health in the most unhealthy of places, in spite of such great fatigue! Oh my God, how your hand was upon me and how little I was aware of it! How you protected me! How you sheltered me under your wings when I did not even believe in your existence! And while you were thus protecting me time passed by, you judged that the time was approaching to draw me back into the fold. In spite of me you undid all the wrong attachments that would have kept me away from you; you even undid all the healthy bonds that would have prevented me from becoming all yours one day… Your hand alone carried out the beginning, middle and end in all this. How good you are! It was needed in order to prepare my soul for truth; the devil is too much master of an unchaste soul to let it enter into truth; you would not be able, my God, to enter a soul in which the demon of squalid passions reigned as lord. But you wanted to enter mine, Oh good Shepherd, and so you cast out your enemy yourself.

maronite readings – rosary,team