'The plans of men, beginning with mine, tend to be exclusive and close-minded: to reach a peace that sometimes is the peace of a cemetery. The plans of God, instead, ask us to risk and try an adventure. All of us, when we start on a new path, have human plans, natural ones, and even beautiful ones. But we are witnesses that, in carrying out our own plans, we fail. God is enlarging our horizons. However, what we are experiencing now is not a human plan, but rather, we are abandoning ourselves to the plans of God, we are entrusted to him who wants to save his children at any price. There are people who drink at a fountain of immense richness, that is true life, real and true peace, and have security for the future, but they are content to take the water using a tiny glass with which they can never quench their thirst ...'



Mother Elvira Petrozzi





'I was reading recently the story of the famous convert of the 19th century, Hermann Cohen, a brilliant musician, idolized as a the young prodigy of his time in the salons of central Europe: a kind of modern version of the young Francis.After his conversion he wrote to a friend: "I looked for happiness everywhere: in the elegant life of the salons, in the deafening noise of balls and parties, in accumulating money, in the excitement of gambling, in artistic glory, in friendship with famous people, in the pleasures of the senses. Now I have found happiness, I have an overflowing heart and I want to share it with you. ... You say, 'But I don't believe in Jesus Christ.' I say to you, 'Neither did I and that is why I was unhappy.''



Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa





'Art does not reproduce what we see; rather it makes us see.'



Paul Klee





'The power of obedience! The lake of Gennesareth had denied its fishes to Peter's nets. A whole night in vain. Then, obedient, he lowered his net again to the water and they caught "a huge number of fish." Believe me: the miracle is repeated each day.'



St. Josemaria Escriva





'All our difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.'



Teresa of Avila



'Yesterday is gone; tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.'



Mother Teresa



'"Prayer" according to one ancient definition, "is keeping company with God." And that really throws us right in at the deep end. Prayer is not another part for us to act, another subject to study for examination: it is a relationship, and a relationship with God. And even in this age of computerized dating, man can only learn to keep company with someone by keeping company with them and accepting the consequences. Any relationship except the most superficial affects and changes us; it challenges us to respect the freedom, the mystery, the otherness of the other, and, perhaps even more disturbing, it will sooner or later bring to light our own freedom, the mystery of ourselves, the unknownness and unpredictability of ourselves. How we respond to such a challenge, to such a bringing to light, will in very large measure decide whether we grow and mature in life, or whether we shrivel up. And it surely is a fact that, while some people are genuinely afraid of the dark, all of us are rather afraid of the light. As the archbishop says in T.S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."Yet God is truth and his light is infinite. To keep company with him allows finally of no hankering after that safe world of blurred edges and comfortable anonymity. We who have been baptized into the death of Jesus have been taken out of darkness and brought into the light; we have been named. It does not matter very much if, for the moment, our eyes are dazzled, our brains reeling and bewildered, and our hearts thumping with terror. The question is: will we turn and bolt? Or will we give it a try, and make the attempt to be children of the light? If we choose to give it a try, then we have already embarked on the adventure of keeping company with God, the adventure of true prayer.'

Fr. Simon Tugwell, O.P.

'When God inspires someone to pray, the desire to pray is itself due to God. But in prayer itself God works more extensively and more profoundly. What led him to pray was something external, a shell; now comes the inner content, the reality, which is the transformation of the one praying into the person God desires. Initially God takes him just as he is: with his ignorance, hesitations and doubts, his more or less good will, with what he offers and with what he withholds. Then gradually, in a timescale which man cannot calculate, God begins to fill and complete him. The man tries to separate himself from whatever prevents him coming to God, and God takes over every empty space thus made available, filling it with his grace and will. The more a man is to be filled by God, the more he needs to have emptied himself and to have died to all that is not of God, so that the life of God can pour forth and take the place of his dying. God's fullness can express itself in such a way that the person never again lapses from the attitude of prayer. He remains constantly attentive to God, endeavoring to do his will, remaining within God's purposes, trying to perform in a spirit of surrender whatever God shows him and asks of him, in the virtue of the inspiration and strength which he gives him. When God takes things away he does not leave a wasteland behind. Right at the beginning of his prayer-life a man can see in detail how God replaces what he sacrifices to him with something better, something divine. He discovers that what it sterile in him is supplanted by God's fruitfulness, an experience that contains the germ of true humility: he sees that he can do nothing of himself and that God does everything.'

Adrienne von Speyr