The spiritual life may be correctly described as the "cultivation of intimacy with God" and the following pages are an attempt to show how the soul may cultivate that intimacy and how it is to overcome the obstacles it encounters in its efforts to become intimate with its Creator.
The science of prayer is the science of the intercourse of man with God. Prayer itself is the unfolding of our mind before the most High and in His presence.
I cannot resist saying that the longer I live the more clearly I both perceive and understand that all depends upon God, and that we have but to make surrender of everything to him to be successful in everything.
Keep then, O happy sinner, keep carefully and watchfully this spirit of yours, this most fitting affection of humility and devotion by which you may always so think of yourself in humility and of the Lord in goodness.
Be sure of this, children; there is not a single instant in which God does not pour into us some divine influence, which we would plainly feel if we were but more attentive.
Recently I read something I had written about Advent in an essay rather a while ago, and in it I pointed out that this holy season every year is a healthy kind of crisis.
I hold it as an impossible thing that anyone who is not interior can attain to the perfect accomplishment of this precept of love for our neighbor.
Not only do we become by means of the sacraments contemporaries of a past that is the very source of our salvation, but we become capable of recuperating the past, of retaking and reconstructing our life by giving it a new unity.
