Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.

The love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.

We are the mediocre,

we are the half givers,

we are the half lovers,

we are the savourless salt.

Break the hard crust

of complacency.

Quicken in us

the sharp grace of desire.

And when I fall, the first time especially, what a light I have on myself! I thought I was strong, that gross temptation would not move me, that I would be faithful in all sorts of environment. I am down--in the dirt--I know myself now! But I know God, too, as I did not before, now I know the radiance of the shadowless light, I know now what sin is.

God is everywhere: yes, but how dim faith is, what a remote idea heaven is, in the modern world!

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

There are people who do not find it necessary to use words or ideas for meditation. We know that we can hear a song, sung in a language of which we know not one word, but of the rhythm, the melody of it finds an answer in our heart, it echoes from our own soul. We can understand it without being able to translate a word of it into our own speech. For some, prayer is like that. The muted music of the human, suffering Christ touches a responsive chord in their own being. They do not require words and images, and indeed cannot use them. They cannot explain. They have no words, even for Christ. Perhaps they do not understand the music themselves. Perhaps if they uttered it aloud it would only confuse the world. It would not sound in their voice as it sounds in their souls.

We are a handful of dust, kept together by seventy-five per cent of liquid, with souls that were stained at birth and which are weighted all through our lives with a heavy downward lurch towards sin.

Sin always wounds the sinner.

God speaks silently, he speaks in your heart; if your heart is noisy, chattering, you will not hear.