Carlo Carretto Quotes

Love is the synthesis of contemplation and action, the meeting-point between heaven and earth, between God and humanity.

God does not hurry over things; time is his, not mine. And I, little creature, a man, have been called to be transformed into God by sharing his life. And what transforms me is the charity which he pours into my heart.

Love is the fulfillment of the law and should be everyone's rule of life; in the end it's the solution to every problem, the motive for all good.

How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you! How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you! I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is. I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms. No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, though not completely. And besides, where would I go? Would I establish another? I would not be able to establish it without the same faults, for they are the same faults I carry in me. And if I did establish another, it would be my Church, not the Church of Christ. I am old enough to know that I am no better than anyone else. …) The Church has the power to make me holy but it is made up, from the first to the last, only of sinners. And what sinners! It has the omnipotent and invincible power to renew the Miracle of the Eucharist, but is made up of men who are stumbling in the dark, who fight every day against the temptation of losing their faith. It brings a message of pure transparency but it is incarnated in slime, such is the substance of the world. It speaks of the sweetness of its Master, of its non-violence, but there was a time in history when it sent out its armies to disembowel the infidels and torture the heretics. It proclaims the message of evangelical poverty, and yet it does nothing but look for money and alliances with the powerful. Those who dream of something different from this are wasting their time and have to rethink it all. And this proves that they do not understand humanity. Because this is humanity, made visible by the Church, with all its flaws and its invincible courage, with the Faith that Christ has given it and with the love that Christ showers on it. When I was young, I did not understand why Jesus chose Peter as his successor, the first Pope, even though he abandoned Him. Now I am no longer surprised and I understand that by founding his church on the tomb of a traitor(…)He was warning each of us to remain humble, by making us aware of our fragility. (…) And what are bricks worth anyway? What matters is the promise of Christ, what matters is the cement that unites the bricks, which is the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit is capable of building the church with such poorly moulded bricks as are we. And that is where the mystery lies. This mixture of good and bad, of greatness and misery, of holiness and sin that makes up the church…this in reality am I .(…) The deep bond between God and His Church, is an intimate part of each one of us. (…)To each of us God says, as he says to his Church, “And I will betroth you to me forever” (Hosea 2,21). But at the same time he reminds us of reality: 'Your lewdness is like rust. I have tried to remove it in vain. There is so much that not even a flame will take it away' (Ezechiel 24, 12). But then there is even something more beautiful. The Holy Spirit who is Love, sees us as holy, immaculate, beautiful under our guises of thieves and adulterers. (…) It’s as if evil cannot touch the deepest part of mankind. He re-establishes our virginity no matter how many times we have prostituted our bodies, spirits and hearts. In this, God is truly God, the only one who can ‘make everything new again’. It is not so important that He will renew heaven and earth. What is most important is that He will renew our hearts. This is Christ’s work. This is the divine Spirit of the Church.

and I repeat again St. Augustine's words: “Love and do as you will.” Don't worry about what you ought to do. Worry about loving. Don't interrogate heaven repeatedly and uselessly saying, “What course of action should I pursue?” Concentrate on loving instead. And by loving you will find out what is for you. Loving, you will listen to the Voice. Loving, you will find peace.

God loves what in us is not yet. What has still to come to birth. What we love in a person is what already is: virtue, beauty, courage, and hence our love is self-interested and fragile. God, loving what is not yet and putting faith in us, continually begets us, since love is what begets. By giving us confidence, God helps us to be born, since love is what helps us emerge from our darkness and draws us to the light. And this is such a fine thing to do that God invites us to do the same. CARLO CARRETTO

Don't worry about what you ought to do. Worry about loving. Don't interrogate heaven repeatedly and uselessly saying, “What course of action should I pursue?” Concentrate on loving instead. And by loving you will find out what is for you. Loving, you will listen to the Voice. Loving, you will find peace.

And if, through this desire of ours to say something, or do something, you feel that you must open your mouth, then do this: choose one word or a little phrase which well expresses your love for him; and then go on repeating it in peace, without trying to form thoughts, motionless in love before God who is love.

I do not believe there is a more difficult task in the world than living on faith, hope, and love! We have to make a leap into the darkness or, more precisely, into the Invisible.

Even the love of study can make people unbelievably selfish; the passion for research can make men as mad and blind as termites in their dark tunnel.

So true prayer demands that we be more passive than active; it requires more silence than words, more adoration than study, more concentration than rushing about, more faith than reason. We must understand thoroughly that true prayer is a gift from heaven to earth, the Father to his child; from the Bridegroom to the bride, from him who has to one who has not, from Everything to nothing.

At the bottom of the human heart there is an ulcer which grows with the years. It is the ulcer of resentment at being exploited by others. Nobody escapes it; it takes time for the soul to locate it and, if and when God wills, to root it out.

We often fail to realize the depth of evil, terrifying as it is. I am not speaking only of the selfishness of the wealthy, heaping up riches for themselves, or of those who sacrifice to achieve their self-selected goals. Or of the dictator who breathes in the incense due only to God. I am speaking of the selfishness of good people, devout people, those who have succeeded through spiritual exercises and self-denial in being able to make the proud profession before the altar of the Most High, “Lord, I am not like the rest of men.” Yes, we have had the audacity at certain times of our lives to believe we are different from other men. And here is the deepest form of self-deception, dictated by self-centeredness at its worst: spiritual egotism. This most insidious form of egotism even uses piety and prayer for its own gain.

WHEN I FIRST CAME to the Sahara I was afraid of the night. For some, night means more work, for others dissipation, for still others insomnia, boredom. For me now it's quite different. Night is first of all rest, real rest. At sunset a great serenity sets in, as though nature were obeying a sudden sign from God.

What is our life on earth, if not discovering, becoming conscious of, penetrating, contemplating, accepting, loving this mystery of Gods, the unique reality which surrounds us, and in which we are immersed like meteorites in space? “In God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). There aren't many mysteries, but there is one upon which everything depends, and it is so immense that it fills the whole space. Human discoveries do not help us to penetrate this mystery. Future millennia will illuminate no further what Isaiah said and what God himself declared to Moses before the burning bush, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).

The darkness is necessary, the darkness of faith is necessary, for God's light is too great. It wounds. I understand more and more that faith is not a mysterious and cruel trick of a God who hides himself without telling me why, but a necessary veil. My discovery of him takes place gradually, respecting the growth of divine life in me.

The heart, with all its potential, loses its balance too easily when it loves a creature. It throws itself upon the creature loved and wants to possess it; and possessiveness kills. It holds on to the creature so passionately that it loses sight of the creator. Moreover it ruins the object of its love by its obsession with it. It ruins it, makes it a slave.

If God were attainable with the intelligence, how unjust it would be! It would have made easy the task of the wise and the great of this world, and would have made knowledge of God all but impossible for the little ones, the poor, and the ignorant. But God himself has found the way to be equally accessible to everybody. His revelation comes in love, in that faculty which we can all share.

Poverty is love for the poor Jesus, and voluntary self-denial. Jesus could have been rich. He did not have to live the kind of life he lived. No, he wanted to be poor in order to share the restrictions of real poverty, to put up with the lack of comfort, to suffer in his body the hard reality which weighs down the man searching for bread, to experience the abiding instability of one who possesses nothing.

And yet that mother is right. She has sacrificed herself for her family. The others have allowed themselves plenty of freedom. She has had no share of it. She has worked, slaved, given up every moment of her day. But there's something more serious, something which is the real cause of suffering. She hasn't been understood. They have taken her for granted; they haven't, for example, noticed her crying in silence.

I thought that in prayer everything depended on me and my efforts, on the books passing through my hands, and the beauty of the words which I was able to introduce into my conversations with God. What is worse, I thought the knowledge of God I was acquiring through study and reasoning was the real and only one. I hadn't yet understood that it was only an image, a covering, an introduction to God's true and authentic revelation, which is supernatural and eternal.

Those who believe that they can speak of what is in the depths of their own soul betray their own inexperience. My God, what an adventure it is, not to understand any longer, nor be able to see. If earlier we possessed “something,” love has now reduced us to nothing. Yes, love has reduced us to nothing. It has taken from us all presumption of knowing or being. It has reduced us to true spiritual childhood. I have held my soul In peace and in silence As a child In its mother's arms. This is the highest state of prayer: to be children in God's arms, silent, loving, rejoicing.

However, in making the assertion that a certain service—in this case, raising children—can in fact be prayer, I am bolstered by the testimony of contemplatives themselves. Carlo Carretto, one of the twentieth century’s best spiritual writers, spent many years in the Sahara Desert by himself praying. Yet he once confessed that he felt that his mother, who spent nearly thirty years raising children, was much more contemplative than he was, and less selfish. If that is true, and Carretto suggests that it is, the conclusion we should draw is not that there was anything wrong with his long hours of solitude in the desert, but that there was something very right about the years his mother lived an interrupted life amid the noise and demands of small children. ... For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put into second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something. Years of this will mature most anyone. It is because of this that she does not need, during this time, to pray for an hour a day. And it is precisely because of this that the rest of us, who do not have constant contact with small children, need to pray privately daily.

God now again intervenes with his consolation, since it would be impossible to live in that state of abandonment. He returns to encourage the soul with the touch of his gentleness. The soul accepts that touch with gratitude. But it has become so timid through the blows it has received that it dare not ask anything more. Deep down the soul has understood that it must let itself be carried, that it must abandon itself to its Savior, that alone it can do nothing, that God can do everything. And if it remains still and motionless, as though bound in the faithfulness of God, it will quickly realize that things have changed, and that its progress, though still painful, is in the right direction.

Thus the time comes when words are superfluous and meditation is difficult, almost impossible. That is the time for the prayer of simplicity. The soul converses with God with a single loving glance, although this may often be accompanied by dryness and suffering. In this period the so-called litanical prayer thrives; that is, repetitions of identical expressions, poor words, but very rich in content. Hail Mary…Hail Mary…Jesus I love you…. Lord have mercy on me…My God and my all. And it is strange how in these ejaculations, monotonous and simple, the soul finds itself at ease, almost cradled in God's arms. It is also a time for the rosary, lived and loved as one of the highest and most inspired prayers.

In fact, since I ceased to love I have known no peace. During my sleepless nights I feel sapped of energy, tormented by the wanderings of my spirit.

One hour a day, one day a month, eight days a year, for longer if necessary, you must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God. If you don't look for this solitude, if you don't love it, you won't achieve real contemplative prayer.

Every morning, after Mass and meditation, you will make your way to work in a store or shipyard. And when you get back in the evening, tired, like all poor men forced to earn their living, you will enter the little chapel of the brotherhood and remain for a long time in adoration; bringing to your prayer all that world of suffering, of darkness, and often of sin, in the midst of which you have lived for eight hours taking your share of pain and toil.

These realities must be sanctified; we must not think that a person is holy just because he has made vows. One with this outlook thinks of the hour of spiritual reading or prayer as the only time for the spiritual life and ignores the longer time dedicated to work and everyday living. The result is at best an anemic and unreliable religious personality.

to be a kind of leaven there.