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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Why should I still work with enthusiasm when someone has been promoted who doesn't really deserve it? In fact, I no longer love; I am unable to. But this inability to love is quite crucial because it leaves me with an enormous feeling of indifference. Whether I like it or not, love is the aim of my life, the reason for my existence, the only thing that really satisfies me.

As long as I waste time defending myself I get nothing done and I am not truly Christian; I do not know the depths of the heart of Jesus. To forgive, really forgive, means convincing ourselves deep down that we merited the wrong done to us.

With your work finished and the caravan halted, you stretch out on the sand with a blanket under your head and breathe in the gentle breeze which has replaced the dry, fiery daytime wind. Then you leave the camp and go down to the dunes for prayer. Time passes undisturbed. No obligations harass you, no noise disturbs you, no worry awaits you: time is all yours. So you satiate yourself with prayer and silence, while the stars light up in the sky.

I understood, for example, that finding one's way in the desert is much easier by night than by day, that the points of reference are numerous and certain. In the years which I spent in the open desert I never once got lost, thanks to the stars. Many times, when searching for a Tuareg camp or a lost weather station, I lost my way because the sun was too high in the sky. But I waited for night and found the road again, guided by the stars.

When my faith was weak, all this would have seemed incomprehensible to me. I was afraid as a child is of the night. But now I have conquered it, and it is mine. I experience joy in night, navigating upon it as upon the sea. The night is no longer my enemy, nor does it make me afraid. On the contrary, its darkness and divine transcendence are a source of delight.

Sometimes I even close my eyes to see more darkness. I know the stars are there in their place, as a witness to me of heaven. And I can see why darkness is so necessary The darkness is necessary, the darkness of faith is necessary, for God's light is too great. It wounds.

In this deeply painful state, prayer becomes true and strong even though it may be as dry as dust. The soul speaks to its God out of its poverty and pain; still more out of its impotence and abjection. Words become even fewer and barer.

This lack of liberty, or rather this slavery to fashion, is one of the idols which attracts a great number of Christians. How much money is sacrificed upon its altar!—without taking into account that so much good could otherwise be done with it. Being poor in spirit means, above all, being unrestrained by what is called fashion; it means freedom.

When you are at home with children, you are in a spiritual realm that would make even the most zealous monastics jealous. One of the most famous contemplative writers of the twentieth century, Carlo Carretto, spent years and years in the Sahara Desert, seeking God in a life of prayer and solitude. Later he admitted that he felt his mother, who spent thirty years raising children, was much more contemplative (and much less selfish!) than he was.

Terence Hill “Come Eastwood non mollo mai” L’attore torna in tv con “A un passo dal cielo” “Niente jeep ma il cavallo per amore della natura” L’attore Terence Hill confessa di scegliere sempre ruoli che gli appartengono anche a rischio di sembrare sempre uguale 673 parole Terence Hill ha una voce da ragazzo, percorsa da una vaga incertezza, anche quando dice cose di cui è profondamente convinto. Sarà per via di questa curiosa intonazione, ma anche, naturalmente, per la trasparenza dello sguardo blu, che la sua carriera, iniziata in un modo, esplosa in un altro, interrotta e poi ripresa in tv, con enorme successo di pubblico, prosegue a gonfie vele e promette ancora numerosi, fortunati, sviluppi. Da domani rivedremo l’attore su Raiuno, per dieci serate, in Un passo dal cielo 3, mentre a maggio inizieranno le riprese della nuova serie di Don Matteo: «Scelgo sempre personaggi adatti a me, dopo Don Matteo mi sono arrivate tante proposte, ho accettato questa, in cui vesto i panni di una guardia forestale, perchè il progetto mi ha entusiasmato, riguarda un tema a me vicino e cioè la passione per la natura». A cavallo o in bicicletta, Terence Hill (nome vero Massimo Girotti, nato a Venezia nel 1939), è sempre riuscito ad attraversare la barriera dello schermo, toccando le corde più profonde di diverse generazioni di pubblico. Da quelle cresciute con la serie di Trinità a quelle che lo ricordano, biondo e prestante, accanto a Lucilla Morlacchi nel Gattopardo di Visconti, da quelle che ormai lo considerano una specie di sacerdote in borghese, capace di risolvere ogni tipo di problema esistenziale, a quelle che conoscono il percorso difficile della sua vita personale, segnata da un lutto terribile come la perdita di un figlio. La sua esistenza d’attore è legata a personaggi longevi. Non ha mai desiderato cambiare, rompere, fare ruoli diversi? «Capisco che certe mie scelte possano apparire monotone, mi hanno chiesto spesso “perchè non fai un’altra cosa?, ma per me conta altro, soprattutto come mi sento...Per esempio con Eriprando Visconti ho girato Il vero e il falso in cui facevo l’avvocato, non mi sono trovato bene, e infatti tutto il film non funzionava...». Invece con Bud Spencer, nei film di Trinità, si è trovato benissimo. «Sa perchè ho scelto di continuare a farli? Una volta ho incontrato una mamma che aveva con sè due bambini di 7 e 5 anni, mi chiese di recitare ancora in tanti film così, dove poteva portare i suoi figli, aveva le lacrime agli occhi, non l’ho mai dimenticata». Oggi ritornerebbe a fare «Trinità»? «Sarebbe fuori luogo, i tempi sono cambiati, la gioia di “Trinità” era lo specchio degli Anni Settanta, c’era un seme di innocenza che adesso non c’è più». Sia Don Matteo, sia il Capo della forestale di «Un passo dal cielo», sono personaggi risolutivi, arrivano e sciolgono i nodi... «Sì, e questo è il motivo principale per cui piacciono tanto. Sono figure epiche, che offrono soluzioni ai guai e che, nel caos generale della vita di tutti, mettono ordine, appaiono rassicuranti. Sa che in Un passo dal cielo sarei dovuto andare in jeep? Sono io che ho voluto il cavallo, molto più adatto a sottolineare il rapporto con la natura». Da tanti anni interpreta un sacerdote, quanto conta per lei la religiosità? «Ho un buon rapporto con la fede, e mi sembra che Don Matteo la trasmetta nella maniera giusta, senza retorica, senza dare lezioncine, senza fare la predica». Possiamo dire che «Don Matteo» è un po’ un prete in stile Bergoglio? «Anzi, direi che Bergoglio ha imitato Don Matteo... Scherzo, Don Matteo riflette la mia passione per i libri di Carlo Carretto, grande cattolico italiano, lui aveva la stessa semplicità che troviamo oggi in Papa Francesco». Ha un sogno nel cassetto, un modello da raggiungere? «Io ho solo buona volontà, cerco di fare bene le cose, il mio modello è Clint Eastwood, ha 10 anni più di me e continua imperterrito ad andare av

A friend said to meL "Don't ask me to waste time praying. Don't ask me to look for God in the solitude of your desert. For me, God is in man, and I will search for rapport with Him by serving man." What can I reply? "Please God, may you succeed! Please God, may you be capable of so much!" You say this to me because you do not yet know man, you do not yet know your weakness in serving man! Keeping an attitude of love and service before the tabernacle of man when you have discovered his egoism, arrogance, and capacity for betrayal, is a frightening and demanding task.

A friend said to me: "Don't ask me to waste time praying. Don't ask me to look for God in the solitude of your desert. For me, God is in man, and I will search for rapport with Him by serving man." What can I reply? "Please God, may you succeed! Please God, may you be capable of so much! You say this to me because you do not yet know man, you do not yet know your weakness in serving man! Keeping an attitude of love and service before the tabernacle of man when you have discovered his egoism, arrogance, and capacity for betrayal, is a frightening and demanding task.

If, without Christ, without the personal help of God, it was possible for man to love and serve man to the uttermost, up to the final sacrifice of himself, the Incarnation would not have been necessary. No man is capable of so much. Sooner or later he will discover within himself how heroic it is to love, how immature his own love is; how great a need he has for a "Power from on high" and divine comfort to resist the temptation of hating everybody and escaping into a cave to live out his own isolation. Yes, I'm saying this bluntly because I have experience of it: only God can help us to love man, only Christ can teach us this difficult lesson.

Only very late do we learn the price of the risk of believing, because only very late do we face up to the idea of death. This is what is difficult. Believing truly means dying. Dying to everything: to our reasoning, to our plans, to our past, to our childhood dreams, to our attachment to earth, and sometimes even to the sunlight, as at the moment of our physical death.

At the same time he puts him into a state of crisis and makes him weak, because it is so difficult to explain things to someone who is always right, who always wins, who is absolutely sure of himself.

Christ has freed us from the past with its infinite complexities. In Him we have become "new creatures" and begun a new life, owing nothing to anyone, writing in our book, "Now I am beginning..." What matter is your past, your sin? Now walk in the newness you have found and sin no more.

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.

Thus, after so many years, I feel I have found the solution to the only real problem we have on earth. I have recognized my powerlessness and this was grace. In faith, hope and love I have contemplated the all-power-fulness of God and this, too, was grace. God can do everything and I can do nothing. But if I offer this nothing in prayer to God, everything becomes possible in me.

I have never found a better metaphor for my relationship with the Eternal: a point lost in infinite space, wrapped round by the night under the subdued light of the stars. I am this point lost in space: the darkness, like an irreplaceable friend, is faith. The stars, Gods witness.

From that moment was established for once and for all the law of forgiveness, mercy and love, which goes far beyond the bounds of justice. After Calvary, peace was no longer to operate on the thin blade of truth or in the court of law, but in the torn heart of a God who had become human for us in Jesus Christ. The era of victimization had ended and with Jesus the reign of the victim was to begin. The true victim, silent and lamb-like, the victim who accepts to be a victim and destroys the thorns of injustice in the fire of his love.

Just as you were beside Jesus, you are still beside us to accompany us to eternal life, to teach us to be small and poor in our work, humble and hidden in life, courageous in trial, faithful in prayer, ardent in love.

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. … There is no limit to such self-deception. And the path, once entered upon, is so slippery that God has to treat us harshly to bring us back to our senses. But there is no other way of opening our eyes. It has to be painful. But often it isn't enough. Disaster, illness, disappointment hover like birds of prey over the poor carcass that had the temerity to say, “Lord, I am not like the rest of men.” How can we possibly entertain the idea that we are different from other men, when we shout, cry, feel afraid, lack determination, and behave atrociously just like everybody else?

Prayer is the sum of our relationship with God. We are what we pray. The degree of our faith is the degree of our prayer.

There is no true religious formation which is not based on the Gospel.

I said earlier that prayer is like love. Words pour at first. Then we are more silent and can communicate in monosyllables. In difficulties a gesture is enough, a word, or nothing at all—love is enough.

This is crucial: as long as we pray only when and how we want to, our life of prayer is bound to be unreal. It will run in fits and starts.

The discovery that I was nothing, that I was responsible for no one, that I was a man of no importance, gave me the joy of a boy on holiday

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.

There is no limit to such self-deception. And the path, once entered upon, is so slippery that God has to treat us harshly to bring us back to our senses. But there is no other way of opening our eyes. It has to be painful. But often it isn't enough. Disaster, illness, disappointment hover like birds of prey over the poor carcass that had the temerity to say, “Lord, I am not like the rest of men.” How can we possibly entertain the idea that we are different from other men, when we shout, cry, feel afraid, lack determination, and behave atrociously just like everybody else?

If we have demonstrated such greed at the table of the body, imagine how we would have behaved at the table of spiritual things, if we had felt ourselves attracted by it.

The more they advance, the more the darkness thickens around them. The more they go on, the more bitter and insipid everything becomes. They derive little comfort from the recollection of times past when God seemed to make their spiritual path easier.

But God does not listen to such entreaty; rather, instead of consolation he sends boredom, and instead of light, darkness. Right there, halfway along our road, we don't know whether we are going backwards or forwards.

Every means has proved powerless, every path too short. God's impenetrable night wraps round us. Terrible loneliness accompanies us, but this is necessary and inevitable. Every word of consolation seems like a lie. One believes one has been abandoned by God.

When I love I can no longer do as I will. When I love I am love's prisoner; and love is tremendous in its demands.