Notes for this theme
Reading comfort
GRM 27.3
We trust in Him, don’t we? We always trust in Him. The harder the trial, the more we trust. Like two children we put our hands in His fatherly ones. He is our guide. We rely entirely on Him. Consider how He has led us with love so far. A father, even the best of fathers, could not do it with greater care. We are His children and His servants. We fulfil His will. No harm can befall us.
GRM 27.5
Love is not the satisfaction of one’s senses and utility. To love is to satisfy him whom we love, beyond senses and utility, giving him the help he needs so that he may always be able to keep his wings open in the skies of hope and peace.
GRM 27.6
Trust summarises the theological virtues. Those who trust have faith. Those who trust hope. Those who trust love. When we love, we hope, we believe in a person, we trust. Otherwise we do not. God deserves our trust. If we trust poor men who may fail, why should we not trust God Who can never fail?
Trust is also humility. The proud man says: ‘I will do it by myself. I do not trust him because he is an incapable man, a liar, an overbearing fellow…’ The humble man says: ‘I trust him. Why should I not? Why should I think that I am better than he is?’ And more rightly he says of God: ‘Why should I mistrust Him Who is so good? Why should I think that I can do it by myself?’ God gives Himself to the humble, but withdraws from the proud.
Trust is also obedience. And God loves the obedient man. Obedience implies that we acknowledge ourselves as His children and we acknowledge God as our Father. And a father can but love when he is a real father. God is our real Father and a perfect Father.
GRM 29.7
Eve’s sin was a four branched tree: pride, avarice, gluttony and lust. And all four were to be cut off, before making the roots of the tree sterile.
GRM 29.10
Heaven! My aim. Where God was. My only hunger. A hunger which is not gluttony, but a necessity blessed by God, Who wants us to crave for Him.
Marie says:
GRM 29.11
Every unrestrained vice leads to a bigger vice.
GRM 29.12
[I] had destroyed in Me the very last trace of Eve. It had destroyed the last root of that tree with four poisonous branches, a root stuck in the sensuality that had dragged mankind to fall and that will go on biting at your intestines until the end of time and to the last woman.
Marie says:
GRM 32.7
The goodwill exerts "with a life devoted, as far as possible, entirely to God: in faith, obedience, purity, charity, generosity and in prayer."
GRM 32.9
Do not be afraid. Be united to the Cross. It has always defeated the snares of the demon, who with the cruelties of men and the sadness of life endeavours to drive to desperation, that is, to separation from God, the hearts he cannot conquer in any other way.
GRM 34.8
He is Your Son, the Saviour, the Christ of God and consequently, to save the world, He will have to take upon Himself the evil of the world, of which one of the punishments is death.
Maria has just described the adoration of the Magi.