Jesus Caritas

Let us stay with Him in the humble house of Nazareth, working people who live by exercising a humble trade, poor and lowly people who live disregarded, obscure, hidden and prayerful in the solitude and seclusion, the silence, forgotteness and communion with God, that poverty helps us so much to obtain.

My life goes on exactly the same way. It is more and more secluded and silent, more and more hidden and lost to view. I am delighted to see myself becoming invisible.

Each night a number of soldiers come to the chapel for their evening prayers... The people come at all hours to ask for alms, while others come to pay friendly calls. God seems to have wanted to make the road to the chapel a familiar one.

The means Jesus used at his birth in the Manger, at Nazareth and on the Cross are these: poverty, utter lowliness, humiliation, rejection, persecution, suffering, the cross. These are our arms, the ones used by our divine Bridegroom, who asks us to let him continue his life in us. Let us follow him as our sole model and we are sure to do much good, for in that case it will not be we who live but he who lives in us. Our acts will no longer be our own, human and frail, but his divinely efficacious acts.

Don't worry. I don't have the strength any more to kill myself working. When I do just a little bit more than my limit, I feel it straight away and I slow down. I put all I can into it, but it's far from being as much as I used to do. Besides, I'm so often interrupted by visits that I have plenty of unplanned relaxations.

How good God is to hide the future from us! What a torture life would be were it less unknown to us! and how good He is to make so clearly known to us the heaven hereafter which will follow Our earthly time of trial.

My God, you kept alive in me an attraction for study, for serious reading and for things that are beautiful, as well as a revulsion for vice and for ugliness. I did evil but didn't approve of what I was doing or like it. You made me feel a searing emptiness, a sadness that I have never experienced except then.