in our daily lives:

...true devotion does no harm whatsoever, but instead perfects all things. When it goes contrary to one's lawful vocation, it is undoubtedly false. "The bee," Aristotle says, "extracts honey out of flowers without hurting them. True devotion does better still. It not only does no injury to one's vocation of occupation, but on the contrary adorns and beautifies it. All kinds of precious stones take on greater luster when dipped into honey, each according to its color. So also every vocation becomes more agreeable when united with devotion. Care of one's family is rendered more peaceable, love of husband and wife more sincere, service of one's prince more faithful, and every type of employment more pleasant and agreeable.

What are the four degrees of love? First, we love ourselves for our own sake; since we are unspiritual and of the flesh we cannot have an interest in anything that does not relate to ourselves. When we begin to see that we cannot subsist by ourselves, we begin to seek God for our own sakes. This is the second degree of love; we love God, but only for our own interests. But if we begin to worship and come to God again and again by meditating, by reading, by prayer, and by obedience, little by little God becomes known to us through experience. We enter into a sweet familiarity with God, and by tasting how sweet the Lord is we pass into the third degree of love so that now we love God, not for our own sake, but for himself. It should be noted that in this third degree we will stand still for a very long time.

I am not certain that the fourth degree of love in which we love ourelves only for the sake of god may be perfectly attained in this life. But, when it does happen, we will experience the joy of the Lord and be forgetful of ourselves in a wonderful way. We are, for those moments, one mind and one spirit with God.

Happy are they who give themselves to God! They are delivered from their passions, from the judgments of others, from their malice, from the tyranny of their sayings, from their cold and wretched mocking, from the misfortunes which the world distributes to wealth, from the unfaithfulness and inconstancy of friends, from the wiles and snares of the enemy, from our own weakness, from the misery and brevity of life, from the horrors of a profane death, from the cruel remorse attached to wicked pleasures, and in the end from the eternal condemnation of God.

We are delivered from this countless mass of evils, because placing our will entirely in the hands of God, we want only what God wants, and thus we find his consolation in faith, and consequently hope in the midst of all sufferings. What weakness it would be then to fear to give ourselves to God and to undertake too soon so desirable a state!

...What folly to fear to be too entirely God's! It is to fear to be too happy. It is to fear to love God's will in all things. It is to fear to have too much courage in the crosses which are inevitable, too much comfort in God's love, and too much detachment from the passions which make us miserable.

Just as our flesh is covered by clothing, and our blood is covered by our flesh, so are we, soul and body, covered and enclosed by the goodness of God. Yet, the clothing and the flesh will pass away, but the goodness of God will always remain and will remain closer to us than our own flesh. God only desires that our soul cling to him with all of its strength, in particular, that it clings to his goodness. For of all the things our minds can think about God, it is thinking upon his goodness that pleases him most and brings the most profit to our soul.

For we are so preciously loved by God that we cannot even comprehend it. No created being can ever know how much and how sweetly and tenderly God loves them. It is only with the help of his grace that we are able to persevere in spiritual contemplation with endless wonder at his high, surpassing, immeasurable love which our Lord in his goodness has for us. Therefore we may ask from our Lover to have all of him that we desire. For it is our nature to long for him, and it is his nature to long for us. In this life we can never stop loving him.

O Lord, be my God, and let there be no other before you. Grant me to worship you and serve you according to your commandments: with truth in my spirit, with reverence in my body, with the blessing upon my lips -- both in private and in public.

Hedge up my way, O Lord, with thorns that I may avoid the false path of vanity. Hold me steady with the bit and the bridle so that I do not pull away from you. O Lord, compel me to come in to you.

Help me to receive faith from his miraculous conception, humility from his lowly birth, patience from his suffering, power to crucify the sin in my life from his Cross, burial of all my evil thoughts in good works from his burial. Grant that I might be able to meditate on hell from his descent, to find newness of life in his resurrection, to set my mind on things above from his ascension, to judge myself in preparation of his returning judgment.

You have loved us first, O God, alas! We speak of it in terms of history as if You have only loved us first but a single time, rather than that without ceasing You have loved us first many times and every day and our whole life through. When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul to you -- You are the first -- You have loved us first; if I rise at dawn and at the same second turn my soul toward You in prayer, You are there ahead of me, You have loved me first. When I withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn my soul toward You, You are the first and thus forever. And yet we always speak ungratefully as if You have loved us first only once.

Father in Heaven! Hold not our sins up against us but hold us up against our sins so that the thought of You when it wakens in our soul, and each time it wakens, should not remind us of what we have committed but of what You did forgive, not of how we went astray but of how You did save us!

living in the Holy Spirit:

April 22, 1930
This morning I started out fresh, by finding a rich experience of God in the sunrise. Then I tried to let him control my hands while I was shaving and dressing and eating breakfast. Now I am trying to let God control my hands as I pound the typewriter keys. There is nothing that we can do excepting to throw ourselves open to God. There is, there must be, so much more in Him than He can give us. It ought to be tremendously helpful to be able to acquire the habit of reaching out strongly after God's thoughts, and to ask, "God, what have you to put into my mind now if only I can be large enough?" That waiting, eager attitude ought to give God the chance he needs.

Oh, this thing of keeping in constant touch with God, making him the object of my thought and the companion of my conversations, is the most amazing thing I ever ran across. It is working. I cannot do it even half a day--not yet, but I believe I shall be doing it some day for the entire day. It is a matter of acquiring a new habit of thought. Now I like God's presence so much that when for a half hour or so he slips out of my mind -- as he does many times a day -- I feel as though I had deserted him, and as though I had lost something very precious in my life.

We should note and know what is the simple truth, namely, that no virtue and no good action, not even the confession that God is good, can make man and his soul virtuous, good, or blissful so long as it occurs outside the soul. Conversely, the same applies to sin and wickedness. It may be commendable to ask, hear about, and gather information concerning good and holy persons, what they have done and suffered, or how they have lived and how God has worked and willed in and through them. But it is a hundredfold better that people deeply within themselves learn and understand the what and the how of life. They need to learn what God is working and doing in them and how God wishes to use them and not to use them. Thus the saying is still true: no outgoing was ever so good that a remaining within was not better.

If we put our finger near a fire, we feel the heat; in much the same way a soul on fire with love feels, I say, a genuine warmth. Sometimes it is more, sometimes less: it depends on our particular capacity. What mortal could survive that heat at its peak -- as we can know it, even here--if it persisted? We must inevitably wilt before the vastness and sweetness of love so intense and heat so indescribable. Yet at the same time we are bound to long eagerly for just this to happen: to breathe our soul out, with all its superb endowment of mind, in this honeyed flame, and, quit of this world, be held in thrall with those who sing their Maker's praise.

The devil has got hold of many whom we count good. For he possesses those who are merciful, chaste, and humble -- self-confessed sinners to a man, of course, hair-shirted and penance-laden! Very often indeed are mortal wounds obscured by the odor of sanctity. The devil may have the busy worker, or even the compelling preacher, but not, surely the person whose heart is aglow with charity, ever eager to love God and indifferent to vanity.

Friends, the Holy Scriptures cry out to us saying, "Everyone that exalts himself shall be humbled; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted." Therefore, they show us that every exaltation of ourselves is a kind of pride. The Psalmist declares that he guarded against this, saying, "Lord, my heart is not puffed up; nor are my eyes haughty. Neither have I waked in great matters nor in things above me." If we wish to reach the height of humility in this present life, we must journey up the ladder of Jacob, wherein he saw angels ascending and descending....

If we ascend all of these steps of humility, we shall arrive at that love of God which, being perfect, casts out all fear. If we persist in observing them, we will begin to keep them without any effort. In time it will no longer be a force of habit, but a way of life. Though we may begin them with a fear of hell, we will begin living them out of a love for Christ, developing habits of good, and taking pleasure in virtue. May the Lord be pleased to manifest all this by his Holy Spirit in you, his laborer, now cleansed from vice and sin.

Devotion is neither private nor public prayer, though public and private prayers are a part of devotion. Devotion signifies a life given or devoted to God. The devout, therefore, are people who do not live to their own will, or in the way and spirit of the world, but only to the will of God. Such people consider God in everything, serve God in everything, and make every aspect of their lives holy by doing everything in the name of God and in a way that conforms to God's glory. We readily acknowledge that God alone is to be the rule and measure of our prayers. In our prayers we are to look totally unto him and act totally for him, and we must pray in this manner and for such ends as are suitable to his glory.

Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, presing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself.

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gently receptiveness to divine breathings. Between these two levels is fruitful interplay, but ever the accent must be upon the deeper level, where the soul dwells in the presence of the Holy One, forever bringing all affairs of the first level down into the Light, holding them there in the Presence, reseeing them in a new and more overturning way and responding to them in spontaneous, incisive, and simple ways of love and faith.

[Revealed Christianity] sets up a relationship of conflict. This is exhausting. It is wearing on both sides. It is intolerable. Here is what I have called the social intolerability of revelation. A much more practical course is to make a gentleman's agreement. It is more satisfying for Christians to build up an organized church, Christian institutions, a Christian society and politics. ...The worst thing is that the intolerable element cuts deeper. It directly affects the human heart. All that the gospel declares is intolerable, unacceptable. Real people in any society, flesh and blood people, cannot swallow it....

Grace is intolerable, the Father is unbearable, weakness is discouraging, freedom in unlivable, spiritualization is deceptive. This is our judgment, and humanly speaking it is well founded and inevitable. This is one of the first reasons for the rejection of the proclamation of God in Jesus Christ. And because we do now want to seem to reject it, perversion and subversion take place. All these judgments and actions are based on good sense, reason, experience, and science, that is, on our ordinary means of judgment, on what all people think and believe.

But it is precisely here that we fall down. Jesus tells us plainly that if we simply do as the world does, we can expect no thanks, for are doing nothing out of the ordinary. What we are summoned to do is something out of the ordinary. We are to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. No less. All else is perversion.