Interior Castle Quotes

The devil frequently fills our thoughts with great schemes, so that instead of putting our hands to what work we can do to serve our Lord, we may rest satisfied with wishing to perform impossibilities.

. . . it is presumptuous in me to wish to choose my path, because I cannot tell which path is best for me. I must leave it to the Lord, Who knows me, to lead me by the path which is best for me, so that in all things His will may be done.

It is a great advantage for us to be able to consult someone who knows us, so that we may learn to know ourselves.

What’s going on?” Royce asked as throngs of people suddenly moved toward him from the field and the castle interior. “I mentioned that you saw the thing and now they want to know what it looks like,” Hadrian explained. “What did you think? They were coming to lynch you?” He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a glass-half-empty kinda guy.” “Half empty?” Hadrian chuckled. “Was there ever any drink in that glass?

Union is as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in it enters in diffrent places but it all becomes one.

I would write a thousand foolish things that one might be to the point, if only it might make us praise God more.

This Beloved of ours is merciful and good. Besides, he so deeply longs for our love that he keeps calling us to come closer. This voice of his is so sweet that the poor soul falls apart in the face of her own inability to instantly do whatever he asks of her. And so you can see, hearing him hurts much more than not being able to hear him… For now, his voice reaches us through words spoken by good people, through listening to spiritual talks, and reading sacred literature. God calls to us in countless little ways all the time. Through illnesses and suffering and through sorrow he calls to us. Through a truth glimpsed fleetingly in a state of prayer he calls to us. No matter how halfhearted such insights may be, God rejoices whenever we learn what he is trying to teach us.

. . . you must not build upon foundations of prayer and contemplation alone, for, unless you strive after the virtues and practice them, you will never grow to be more than dwarfs.

It is surely justice to share our natural gifts with those who share our nature.

There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Bountiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxi cation so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway… Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.

God's will is that no bounds should be set to His works.

souls without prayer are like people whose bodies or limbs are paralysed: they possess feet and hands but they cannot control them.

The “interior castle” of the human soul, as Teresa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow.

And what is the problem? It is the old problem of the anxious searcher - the mythic in the interior castle, the poet-pilgrim in a dark wood not sure how to proceed. Which way is the right way?

For though we know quite well that God is present in all that we do, our nature is such that it makes us lose sight of the fact; but when this favour is granted it can no longer do so, for the Lord, who is near at hand, awakens it. And even the favours aforementioned occur much more commonly, as the soul experiences a vivid and almost constant love for Him whom it sees or knows to be at its side.

Since God has given it such great dignity, permitting it to wander at will through the rooms of the castle, from the lowest to the highest. Let it not force itself to remain for very long in the same mansion, even the one of self-knowledge.

It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are.

Trust God that you are where you are meant to be.

What Rangers do, or more correctly, what Rangers’ apprentices do, is the housework.” Will had a sinking feeling as the suspicion struck him that he’d made a tactical error. “The…housework?” he repeated. Halt nodded, looking distinctly pleased with himself. “That’s right. Take a look around.” He paused, gesturing around the interior of the cabin for Will to do as he suggested, then continued, “See ay servants?” “No, sir,” Will said slowly. “No sir indeed!” Halt said. “Because this isn’t a mighty castle with a staff of servants. This is a lowly cabin. And it has water to be fetched and firewood to be chopped and floors to be swept and rugs to be beaten. And who do you suppose might do all those things, boy?” Will tried to think of some answer other than the one which now seemed inevitable. Nothing came to mind, so he finally said, in a defeated tone, “Would that be me, sir?” “I believe it would be,” the Ranger told him, then rattled off a list of instructions crisply. “Bucket there. Barrel outside the door. Water in the river. Ax in the lean-to, firewood behind the cabin. Broom by the door and I believe you can probably see where the floor might be?” “Yes, sir,” said Will, beginning to roll up his sleeves.

Once, when she was travelling to one of her convents, St. Teresa of Ávila was knocked off her donkey and fell into the mud, injuring her leg. “Lord,” she said, “you couldn’t have picked a worse time for this to happen. Why would you let this happen?” And the response in prayer that she heard was, “That is how I treat my friends.” Teresa answered, “And that is why you have so few of them!

But here the Lord asks only two things of us: love for His Majesty and love for our neighbour. It is for these two virtues that we must strive, and if we attain them perfectly we are doing His will and so shall be united with Him.

do not try to get so much that you achieve nothing. Look

knoweth things as they are and not as they are said or seem to be, he truly is wise, and is taught of God more than of men. He who knoweth

to say nothing through fear that taking the matter up would be yielding to temptation would itself be to yield to temptation.

perfection consists not in consolations, but in the increase of love;

This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway. Step around the poisonous vipers that slither at your feet, attempting to throw you off your course. Be bold. Be humble. Put away the incense and forget the incantations they taught you. Ask no permission from the authorities. Slip away. Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home.

The thing about building a castle in the air is it's easy. You build up. It's like a little ladder, then you start building a castle in the air. Then, you destroy the ladder. And your castle is floating.

As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or Who dwells within them, or how precious they are -- those are things which we seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul's beauty. All our interest is centred in the rough setting of the diamond, and in the outer wall of the castle -- that is to say, in these bodies of ours.

Let us look at our own shortcomings and leave other people’s alone; for those who live carefully ordered lives are apt to be shocked at everything and we might well learn very important lessons from the persons who shock us. Our

But, as I know that strength arising from obedience has a way of simplifying things which seem impossible, my will very gladly resolves to attempt this task although the prospect seems to cause my physical nature great distress; for the Lord has not given me strength enough to enable me to wrestle continually both with sickness and with occupations of many kinds without feeling a great physical strain. May He Who has helped me by doing other and more difficult things for me help also in this: in His mercy I put my trust.

See then how He returns, not in actual flesh and blood, but, as I have said, building the road of His doctrine, with His power, which road cannot be destroyed or taken away from him who wishes to follow it, because it is firm and stable, and proceeds from Me, who am immovable.

The mind’s continual keeping in the presence of God 8 and the concentration of its thoughts on Him would so enrage the fiend that, although he might try the experiment once, he

I was recently told by a great theologian that souls without prayer are like bodies, palsied and lame, having hands and feet they cannot use.

It is by humility that the Lord allows Himself to be conquered so that He will do all we ask of Him,

His head reminded one of an ancient castle keep, with its unmanned battlements still preserved but its interior transformed into a library.

spiritual marriage is like rain falling from heaven into a river

Since we can enjoy heaven on earth, be brave in begging the Lord that nothing will be lacking through our own fault, that with God's help we dig until we find this treasure.

Remain with Him in thy chamber, for thou shalt not elsewhere find so great peace.

if it is prayer at all, it must be accompanied by meditation.

she might even be so zealous about religious observances as to be unable to see her own faults;

our faculties seem to be making war upon us, as if they were resentful of the war made upon them by our vices.

Let us realize, my daughters, that true perfection consists in the love of God and of our neighbour, and the more nearly perfect is our observance of these two commandments, the nearer to perfection we shall be.

The soul is like a fountain built near its source and the water of life flows into it, not through an aqueduct, but directly from the spring. Its love is now free from servile fear: it has broken all the bonds which previously hindered its progress;

let us desire that not our wills, but His will, be done.74 If we have not progressed as far as this, then, as I have said, let us practise humility, which is the ointment for our wounds; if we are truly humble, God, the Physician,75 will come in due course, even though He tarry, to heal us.

I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity. In fact, however acute our intellects may be, they will no more be able to attain to a comprehension of this than to an understanding of God; for, as He Himself says, He created us in His image and likeness.

that you may reap humility from your dryness, instead of the disquietude the devil strives to cause by it. I believe that where true humility exists, although God should never bestow consolations, yet He gives a peace and resignation which make the soul happier than are others with sensible devotion.

One lie might eye the highest throne / inside the castle of your mind, / and any whim may play the lord / when left unchecked, out of control, / once knights of reason flee their posts, / let sentiments invade these walls, / then leave the keep without defense. / How easily a kingdom falls! (from Interior Kingdom)

When the Lord is pleased to withdraw, the soul is left in great loneliness; yet all the possible efforts that it might make to regain His companionship are of little avail, for the Lord gives this when He wills and it cannot be acquired. Sometimes again, companionship comes from a saint which is also a great help to us.

Any unrest and any strife can be borne, as I have already said, if we find peace where we live; but if we would have rest from the thousand trials which afflict us in the world and the Lord is pleased to prepare such rest for us, and yet the cause of the trouble is in ourselves, the result cannot but be very painful, indeed almost unbearable.

Royce found Hadrian splitting logs near the stockade gate. He was naked to the waist except for the small silver medallion that dangled from his neck as he bent forward to place another wedge. He had a solid sweat worked up along with a sizable pile of wood. “Been meddling, have you?” Royce asked, looking around at the hive of activity. “You must admit they didn’t have much in the way of a defense plan,” Hadrian said, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Royce smiled at him. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” “And you? Did you find the doorknob?” Hadrian picked up a jug and downed several swallows, drinking so quickly some of the water dripped down his chin. He poured some in his palm and rinsed his face, running his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t even get close enough to see a door.” “Well, look on the bright side”—Hadrian smiled—“at least you weren’t captured and condemned to death this time.” “That’s the bright side?” “What can I say? I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy.” There he is,” Russell Bothwick shouted, pointing. “That’s Royce over there.” “What’s going on?” Royce asked as throngs of people suddenly moved toward him from the field and the castle interior. “I mentioned that you saw the thing and now they want to know what it looks like,” Hadrian explained. “What did you think? They were coming to lynch you?” He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a glass-half-empty kinda guy.” “Half empty?” Hadrian chuckled. “Was there ever any drink in that glass?

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty. I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.

When a boy grows up in a “dysfunctional” family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early. Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king. The King in a child stands for and stands up for the child’s mood. But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed-up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent. We can say that when the warriors inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, go into trance, or die. The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model. The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in. But a typical child has no such protection. If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense—it happens. If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens. Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included. Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Shame is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings. Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work. When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overwhelming proof of our inadequacy. A slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated. If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as children can do about it. Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame. What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again. When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept into the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver. The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.

When we proceed with all this caution, we find stumbling-blocks everywhere; for we are afraid of everything, and so dare not go farther, as if we could arrive at these Mansions by letting others make the journey for us! That is not possible, my sisters; so, for the love of the Lord, let us make a real effort: let us leave our reason and our fears in His hands and let us forget the weakness of our nature which is apt to cause us so much worry. Let our superiors see to the care of our bodies; that must be their concern: our own task is only to journey with good speed so that we may see the Lord. Although we get few or no comforts here, we shall be making a great mistake if we worry over our health, especially as it will not be improved by our anxiety about it -- that I well know. I know, too, that our progress has nothing to do with the body, which is the thing that matters least. What the journey which I am referring to demands is great humility, and it is the lack of this, I think, if you see what I mean, which prevents us from making progress. We may think we have advanced only a few steps, and we should believe that this is so and that our sisters' progress is much more rapid; and further we should not only want them to consider us worse than anyone else, but we should contrive to make them do so.

You don’t know what you’re doing,’ Lymond said. ‘You’re performing a play, in a schoolroom, for an excited audience of one. I said what else have you done?’ Below the long, taffeta bodice, Philippa’s interior had begun to ravel with cramp pains. She said hardily, ‘Nothing, so far. I didn’t know another permutation in breeding was possible.’ There was another brief pause. Then Lymond said pleasantly, ‘I would strike a man who was stupid enough to say that to me.

In choosing candidates for this challenging way of life, she emphasised intelligence and good judgment (“GOD PRESERVE US FROM STUPID NUNS !! ) . It was her conviction that intelligent people can better be aware of their faults and, at the same time, see the need to be guided.

there is no reason why we should expect everyone else to travel by our own road, and

Well, I cannot find, and have never found, any way of comforting such people, except to express great sorrow at their trouble, which, when I see them so miserable, I really do feel. It is useless to argue with them, for they brood over their woes and make up their minds that they are suffering for God’s sake, and thus never really understand that it is all due to their own imperfection. And

I believe we shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. 11.

As I see it, we shall never succeed in knowing ourselves unless we seek to know God: let

Let humility be always at work, like the bee at the honeycomb, or all will be lost.

FLORENCE DURING THE Renaissance was not green and airy; it was crowded and noisy. Oxcarts, mules, and passersby pushed their way through narrow, foul-smelling streets, which were as dark as tunnels, because many of the householders had added oriel windows to the upper floors. Buildings were going up everywhere. Workmen pulled down old, cramped dwellings and carted in building materials for palaces until these became a scarce commodity. Many of these new houses were as big as castles. One could lose one’s way for hours in their suites of brightly painted rooms. During the fifteenth century rich Florentines grew even richer, while the poor became even poorer. 1 Wealthy families also cut themselves off from the city. Where their palazzi would once have opened on to the city with a loggia, they now looked inward over magnificent interior courtyards where social events took place.

the Lord asks only two things of us: love for His Majesty and love for our neighbour.

Lord of ours is so anxious that we should desire Him and strive after His companionship that He calls us ceaselessly, time after time, to approach Him; and this voice of His is so sweet that the poor soul is consumed with grief at being unable to do His bidding immediately; and thus, as I say, it suffers more than

which we receive from God; and shows how the door of this castle is prayer.

obedience,

If we muse on this deeply, friends, we will see that the soul of a righteous person is none other than a garden in which the Beloved takes great delight. What

a garden in which the Beloved takes great delight. What do you think a place might be like that such a king—so powerful and wise, so pure and filled with all good things—would find so delightful? I

Our intellects, no matter how sharp, can no more grasp this than they can comprehend God.

… Spiritual betrothal is different… Even though by union is meant the joining of two things into one, each of the two, as is a matter of common observation, can be separated and remain a thing by itself… We might say that union is like the joining of two wax candles so that the flame coming from them is but one… Yet afterwards one candle can be easily separated from the other and there are two candles again. In the spiritual marriage the union is like what we have when rain falls from the sky into a river or fount; all is water, for the rain that fell from heaven cannot be divided or separated from the water of the river. Or when a little stream enters the sea, there is no means of separating the two. Or, like the bright light entering a room through two windows; although the streams of light are separate when entering the room they become one.

Gothic is the genre of fear. Our fascination with it is almost always revived during times of instability and panic. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the rise of the genre as 'the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded,' and literary critics in the late eighteenth century mocked the work of early gothic writers Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis by referring to it as 'the terrorist school' of writing. As Fred Botting writes in Gothic, his lucid introduction to the genre, it expresses our unresolved feelings about 'the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality' and yet is extremely concerned with issues of social disintegration and collapse. It's preoccupied with all that is immoral, fantastic, suspenseful, and sensational and yet prone to promoting middle-class values. It's interested in transgression, but it's ultimately more interested in restitution; it alludes to the past yet is carefully attuned to the present; it's designed to evoke excessive emotion, yet it's thoroughly ambivalent; it's the product of revolution and upheaval, yet it endeavors to contain their forces; it's terrifying, but pretty funny. And, importantly, the gothic always reflects the anxieties of its age in an appropriate package, so that by the nineteenth century, familiar tropes representing external threats like crumbling castles, aristocratic villains, and pesky ghosts had been swallowed and interiorized. In the nineteenth century, gothic horrors were more concerned with madness, disease, moral depravity, and decay than with evil aristocrats and depraved monks. Darwin's theories, the changing roles of women in society, and ethical issues raised by advances in science and technology haunted the Victorian gothic, and the repression of these fears returned again and again in the form of guilt, anxiety, and despair. 'Doubles, alter egos, mirrors, and animated representations of the disturbing parts of human identity became the stock devices,' Botting writes, 'signifying the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which s/he is located.' In the transition from modernity to post-modernity, the very idea of culture as something stable and real is challenged, and so postmodern gothic freaks itself out by dismantling modernist grand narratives and playing games. In the twentieth century, 'Gothic [was] everywhere and nowhere,' and 'narrative forms and devices spill[ed] over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres.

The Titanic had started a trend in nonnaval interior design which the Morro Castle carried to the extreme.

Fixed your eyes on the Crucified One and all will seem easy.

In the Second Mansion, you aim to become more discerning about your thoughts, motivations, and personal companions. We all need to be more discriminating about whom we allow into the circles that influence our souls. Beyond your friendships and social interactions, you need to become aware of how your psyche and soul are changing, of their shifts in perceptions. As you become more awakened, you may become more psychically hypersensitive and reactive to other people’s emotional energy, to highly charged negative atmospheres, to stresses in people around you, or even to the great tensions of the planet. Teresa warned her nuns that as they progressed in their Castles, they would become vulnerable in some way to other people’s emotional, psychological, mental, and spiritual debris. You need to learn, as an emerging mystic, how to protect your energy field. This hypersensitivity can be brought on by spending too much time alone in retreat or by opening up too many interior rooms too rapidly. In rare cases, achieving a blissful state of consciousness can result in a sense of ungroundedness and disorientation. A more common experience is that reading sacred literature and doing soul work can shift your values and make you feel very detached from your familiar world. In these states, you require serious hand-holding and the companionship of someone who understands the journey of the soul. You will always need to maintain a solitary, silent prayer life and time for reflection, but you will also need to reach out to at least one other person to share your experience of God.

Active prayer is generally defined as any prayer that begins with our effort and ends in God. During active prayer, you, the primary actor, choose to use your human effort to love God in prayer. This is done by engaging your intellect, will, passions, emotions, and even your body in the worship of God. Though this is the prayer for all beginners in prayer, this form of prayer must forever be part of a person’s daily worship of God, to one extent or another. The more you grow in your life of prayer, however, and the deeper you enter into the Interior Castle of your soul, the less central active prayer will become as it gives way to passive prayer.

Active recollection is begun by closing your eyes and looking within. You attempt to ignore the outside world, intentionally ignoring your senses. As you do, you look for the King as He resides within the castle of your soul. You look for Him, call to Him, converse with Him, pour out your troubles to Him, love Him, and gaze at Him.

In Interior Castle she describes seven different “mansions” of the soul and the progress by which prayer and spiritual practice take us into the innermost place of mystical marriage of the soul with God. In The Life of

Her eyes opened at the touch of light. It was slanting light, golden and shimmering with dust, the kind that filtered through the forests on Hy-Brasil in the late afternoon. And yet when she stepped forward, she found she was no longer amid the trees but inside, at the center of a circular tower that extended up for as far as her eyes could stretch. The walls were the white of polished marble, and the floor beneath her feet was polished wood partially covered by a thick red rug. There was a fireplace with two worn armchairs, and a desk fitted to the curve of the room and strewn with papers. Everything else, every inch of towering wall, was filled with bookshelves. They went all the way up to the high ceiling, at least seven stories, connected by ladders and balconies and ledges. The place had the old-paper smell of Rowan's study at the castle. Biddy stared, barely noticing as Hutchincroft jumped from her arms. "It's a library," she said out loud, in wonder. "It's a library inside a tree.

God gives to whom He wills, what He wills, when He wills - which pretty much includes everybody. But if we don't know where we're going, the unenlightened soul may actually flee in fear from advanced favors from God because they don't understand what's happening to them.

the person who lacks a practical understanding of the stages of prayer and the mystical life places themselves at a distinct disadvantage, especially when hardships come. For instance, the person who doesn't understand that progress in prayer often means long dry spells devoid of all consolation can easily turn away from the true path and become a kind of religious "thrill seeker", gladly pursuing all those trendy New Age styles of mind-blanking prayer and a preoccupation with the self rather than the Divine.

excessive attachments are to be avoided, especially in relationships. For example, a parent can be so possessive of a child it becomes harmful to the child, a friend may lead one to sin, and so on. Excessive desires cloud our recognition of truth. They keep us from thinking clearly and cause anxiety. It is why you see agitation in so many persons here.

Catholics believe that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God and is not produced by the parents.[9] We also believe that the soul is immortal. "It does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection."[10] As Dr. Richard Geraghty explains for EWTN, the soul is a spiritual or immaterial thing which means it has no physical parts that can fall apart, get sick, be crushed, or otherwise put out of existence. This is how we know that it will live forever.

Black water and mud emitting a foul odor oozed from the darkness. A person stepped out of the building. Mundana stared in horror. Rats, insects, and evil-looking creatures swarmed around him, attempting to nip or crawl on him. He made no attempt to brush them away. Instead he turned and re-entered the house. “You have seen the soul of a person living in serious sin. Mortal sin, the one and only thing you should fear,” said Wisdom. “Why doesn’t he run away from that horrible place?” Sadness in her eyes, Wisdom answered. “Jesus said, ‘I am telling you the truth: everyone who sins is a slave to sin.’ ” (John 8:34) Sighing, she added, “Slaves are not free to run away, my dear.

Why do so many have chains?” “You have seen souls burdened with attachments, but these souls are also bound in fear. They are free to go, but lack of trust in God keeps them prisoners here, afraid to venture forth.” “They look so unhappy.” “If you wish to avoid their misery, listen to what I tell you now, Mundana. It is most important.” Fidelity stopped walking and gazed at her intently. “Know yourself! There is no growth without self-knowledge. It is the first step to freedom.

What will He not give Who so much loves giving and can give all that He will?

God is not only the most high, he is also the all-near as well. Teresa's discovery of the presence of God within every soul came in the light of a contemplative grace.

than it is not to exceed in word.

Let us endeavour to do our best: beware of the poisonous reptiles--that is to say, the bad thoughts and aridities which are often permitted by God to assail and torment us so that we cannot repel them. Indeed, perchance we feel their sting! He allows this to teach us to be more on our guard in the future and to see whether we grieve much at offending Him.

is unspeakably more foolish to care to learn nothing of our nature except that we possess bodies, and only to realize vaguely that we have souls, because people say so

that true perfection consists in the love of God and our neighbour, and the better we keep both these commandments, the more perfect we shall be.

Let her endeavour to serve Him and to amend her life in every respect; then she will see what will follow and how she will obtain still higher and higher gifts.

Love does not consist in great sweetness of devotion, but in a fervent determination to strive to please God in all things, in avoiding, as far as possible, all that would offend Him,

There is no life more real than the interior life of the soul;

Beg our Lord to grant you perfect love for your neighbour, and leave the rest to Him.

He always gives us much more than we deserve by granting us a spiritual sweetness much greater than we can obtain from the pleasures and distractions of this life.

His secrets are hidden deep; but all that he does will be best for us, without the slightest doubt.

it has acquired prudence and discretion and orders its life well. Its limitations are those of vision: it has not yet experienced to the full the inspiring force of love. It has not made a full self-oblation, a total self-surrender. Its love is still governed by reason, and so its progress is slow.

I know, too, that our progress has nothing to do with the body, which is the thing that matters least.

if you would progress a long way on this road and ascend to the Mansions of your desire, the important thing is not to think much, but to love much; do, then, whatever most arouses you to love. Perhaps we do not know what love

You must remember not to build on prayer and contemplation alone. Unless you strive to live the virtues, you will never grow beyond the stature of spiritual dwarves.

Prayer alone can do a lot of good for the people you pray for. Beyond that, it’s not necessary to try to help the whole world. Concentrate on your own circle of companions who need you. Then, whatever you do will be of greater benefit.