Everyday actions

Do not accumulate your treasures on the earth, living for them, being cruel for them, cursed by your neighbour and by God on account of them. It is not worth it, They are never safe in this world. Thieves can always rob you. Fire can always destroy your houses. Diseases of plants and animals can exterminate herds and orchards. How many things undermine your property! Whether it is real estate and unassailable, such as houses and gold; whether its nature is liable to be damaged, such as all living things, vegetables and animals, or precious cloths, they can be ruined. Thunderbolts, fire and floods can destroy houses; thieves, blight, dry weather, rodents and insects can damage fields; catching diseases, fever, crippling, murrain can destroy cattle; moths and mice can ruin valuable pieces of cloth and precious pieces of furniture; oxidization can corrode vases, chandeliers and artistic gates; everything is subject to destruction.

But if you turn earthly welfare into supernatural good, then it becomes free from all damage by time, men and calamities. Store your treasures in Heaven, where thieves cannot break them, and where no calamities occur. Work with merciful love for all the miseries of the earth. You may caress your money and kiss it if you wish so, you may rejoice at the plentiful crops, at the vineyards laden with grapes, at the countless number of olives which bend the branches of the olive-trees, and at your prolific sheep with turgid udders. You may rejoice at all that, but not in a sterile or human way. Rejoice with love and admiration, with supernatural delight and foresight.

“Thank You, my God, for this money, for these crops, plants, sheep and for this business! Thank you, sheep, plants, meadows, business, which serve me so well. May you all be blessed, because through Your goodness, o Eternal Father, and through yours, o things of mine, I can do so much good to those who are hungry, or are naked, homeless, sick, alone… Last year I did it for ten. This year — as I have more money, although I gave away much as alms, and the crops are more plentiful and the flocks larger — I will give twice, three times as much as last year. So that everybody, also those who have no wealth of their own, may partake of my joy and bless with me the Eternal Lord”. That is the prayer of a just man. A prayer, which joined to your deeds, transfers your wealth to Heaven, and not only keeps it eternally for you, but you will find it increased by the holy fruit of love.

Store your treasure in Heaven so that your heart may also be there, above and beyond the risk that not only your gold, your houses, fields and herds may suffer damage, but that your very heart may be attacked and robbed, corroded, burnt and killed by the spirit of the world. If you do that, you will have your treasure in your heart because you will have God within you until the blessed day when you will be in Him.

• Acts - Actions
• Cruelty
• Curse
• Doing Good
• Flight
• God's curse
• Heaven - Paradiso
• How to perfect and sanctify yourself
• Illness - Disability - Handicap
• Mercy and forgiveness
• Misfortunes
• Poverty - Misery
• Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too
• Work

In order not to diminish the fruit of charity, take care to be charitable in a supernatural spirit. What I said with regards to prayer and to fasting applies also to charity and to any other good action you may do.

Keep the good you may do free from the violating sensation of the world, keep it immune from human praise. Do not profane the scented rose of your charity and of your good deeds, as it is a true censer of perfumes agreeable to the Lord. Good is profaned by a proud spirit, by the desire to be noted when doing good and by the quest for praise. The rose of charity is then dribbled and eaten away by the big slimy snails of satisfied pride and the censer is filled with the fetid straw of the litter on which the proud man basks like a well fed animal.

Oh! Those deeds of charity accomplished to be pointed out by people! It would be better, much better, if they had not been performed at all! He who does not do them, commits a sin of harshness. He who does them, letting people know both the amount given and the name of the person to whom it was given, and begging for praise, commits a sin of pride by making the offer known, as he says: “See how much I can afford?”, he sins against charity because he humbles the beneficiary by making his name known, and commits a sin of spiritual avarice as he wants to accumulate human praises… It is straw, nothing but straw. Let God and His angels praise you.

• Acting in secret
• Acts - Actions
• Charity
• Discretion
• Greed
• How to perfect and sanctify yourself
• Praise and acclaim
• Pride
• Rightness of intention - Purity of intention
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment

When you give alms do not have it trumpeted before you, to draw the attention of passers-by and win their praise, as the hypocrites do, who want to be praised by men and thus give alms only where they can be seen by many people. They, too, have received their reward and will not have another one from God. Do not commit the same sin and do not be so presumptuous. But when you give alms your left hand must not know what your right is doing, so secret and modest is your almsgiving and then forget about it. Do not linger admiring your deed, swelling with it like the toad that contemplates itself with its veiled eyes in the pond and sees also the clouds, trees and a chart near the bank reflected in the still water and when it sees that it is so small as compared to them, which are so large, it swells up with air until it bursts. Also your charity is nothing as compared to the Infinite, which is the Charity of God, and if you wanted to become like Him and make your small charity so big as to be equal to His, you would fill yourselves with the wind of pride and would end up by perishing.

Forget about it. Forget about the action itself. A light, a sweet voice will always be present with you and will make your day bright, sweet and happy. Because that light will be the smile of God, the honey will be the spiritual peace, which still comes from God, and the voice will be the voice of God, the Father Who will say to you: “Thank you”. He sees the hidden evil and the concealed good and will give you a reward for them.

• Acting in secret
• Acts - Actions
• Alms
• Bible - Gospel of Matthew
• Charity
• Discretion
• God the Father
• How to perfect and sanctify yourself
• Light from God
• Peace
• Pride
• Reward
• Rightness of intention - Purity of intention
• When your left hand ignores what your right hand is doing

And I therefore say to you: do not worry too much because you are afraid of having too little. You will always have what is necessary. Do not worry too much about your future. Nobody knows how much future there is ahead of him. Do not worry about what you will eat to support yourselves in life or what clothes you will put on to keep your bodies warm. The life of your souls is by far more precious than your stomachs and your limbs, it is much more valuable than your food and your clothes, exactly as material life is more valuable than food and the body more precious than its clothes. And your Father knows. You ought to know, too. Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns, and yet they do not starve to death because the heavenly Father feeds them. And you men, the favourite creatures of the Father, are worth much more than they are.

Which of you, with all his talent, can add one single cubit to his height? If you cannot raise your height even by a span, how can you possibly change your future conditions, increasing your wealth, to ensure that you will live to a long and happy old age? Can you say to death: “You shall come for me when I want”? You cannot. Why, then, worry about your future? And why go to so much trouble lest you should be left without clothes? Think of the lilies growing in the fields: they do not work or spin, they do not buy any cloth from vendors, yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of them. Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field, which is there today and will be thrown into the furnace tomorrow or used to feed the cattle and will thus end up in ash or dung, how much more He will see to you, His children?

Do not be of little faith. Do not worry about an uncertain future saying: “What shall I eat when I am old? What shall I drink? How will I clothe myself?”. Leave such worries to the Gentiles, who do not have the lofty certainty of the divine paternity. You have it and you know that the Father is aware of your needs and loves you. Therefore trust Him. Seek first what is really necessary: faith, goodness, charity, humility, mercy, purity, justice, meekness, the three and four main virtues, and all the others as well, in order to be the friends of God, and have a right to His Kingdom. And I can assure you that all the rest will be given to you as well, without having to ask for it. There is no rich man richer than a saint or any man safer than he is. God is with the saint and the saint is with God. He does not ask anything for his body, and God supplies what is necessary. But he works for his soul, and God gives Himself to him in this world, and Paradise in the next one.

So do not go to any trouble for what is not worth your trouble. Let your imperfections grieve you, not your scanty earthly means. Do not worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself, and you will take care of it when you live it. Why worry today? Is life not already quite full of yesterday’s sad memories and of today’s troubles, that we should feel the need to add the nightmares of tomorrow’s uncertainties? Leave to each day its own trouble! There will always be in life more pains than we would wish, without adding the present pains to future ones! Always say the great word of God: “Today”. You are His children, created to His likeness. So say with Him: “Today”.

• Abandon
• Anxiety - Fear - Fearfulness
• Children of God - Sons of God
• Field lily
• Food
• Future
• God the Father
• How to perfect and sanctify yourself
• Life and death
• Material wealth
• Providence
• Reading and knowing the future
• Salomon (biblical character)
• Tomorrow will worry about itself; each day has its own punishment
• Trust in Providence - Be like the birds

[Resist] to the allurements of senses, of the world, of science, of the demon. Leave half faiths, compromises, pacts with two people, one opposed to the other, to the men of the world. They, too, should avoid them, if they are honest. At least you, men of God, must shun them. You cannot have them either with God or with Mammon. You must not have them with yourselves either because they would be of no value. If your actions are a mixture of good and evil, they are of no value whatsoever. The entirely good ones would be cancelled by the bad ones. The evil ones would lead you straight into the Enemy’s arms. Therefore do not indulge in them. Be loyal in your service. No one can serve two masters with two different minds. He will either love one and hate the other or viceversa. You cannot be both of God and of Mammon. The spirit of God cannot be conciliated with the spirit of the world. The former ascends, the latter descends. The former sanctifies, the latter corrupts.

• Acts - Actions
• Compromises - Pacts - Arrangements
• God or Mammon
• Good and evil
• Honesty
• Inconstancy
• Sanctification
• Science - Scholars - Scientists
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment
• World

(...) I therefore say to you: “If a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her because his thought has accomplished the deed of his desire”. If your right eye should cause you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to be without one eye than to be thrown into the infernal darkness forever. And if your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away, for it will do you less harm to lose one part, than you to have your whole body sent to hell.

• Acts - Actions
• Damnation - Perdition - Hell and the damned
• Desire
• If your hand is an occasion for falling, cut it off; if your eye is an occasion for falling, pluck it out.

Master… You gave me such bread today… You really are the Bread of the spirit!

• Character prophecies in the EMV
• Effects of reading the Work
• Effects of the Word of God
• Eucharist
• Jesus Christ
• Spiritual nourishment

Now listen to the spirit of the parable.

We have four kinds of fields: the fertile ones, the thorny ones, the stony ones and the ones full of paths. We also have four types of spirits.

There are the honest spirits, the spirits of goodwill, prepared by their own will and by the work of an apostle, of a “true” apostle; because there are apostles who have the name but not the spirit of an apostle and they are more lethal for the will in formation, than birds, thorns and stones, They upset in such a way, through their intolerance, their haste, their reproaches and their threats, as to drive people away from God forever. There are others who, on the contrary, through an excess of benignity, utterly out of place, cause the seed to rot in too soft a soil. Because of their lack of vigour, they kill the vigour of the souls they cure. But let us consider true apostles, that is, the shining mirrors of God. They are paternal, merciful, patient, and at the same time they are strong, as their Lord is strong. Now: the souls prepared by them and by their own will can be compared to the fertile fields, free from stones and brambles, from couch-grass and darnel, in which the word of God thrives and every word, that is every seed, bears a bundle of ears, yielding in some places one hundred, in others sixty per cent. Are there any like that among those who follow Me? There certainly are. And they will be holy. They come from all castes and countries. And there are Gentiles among them and they will yield one hundred per cent because of their goodwill, only because of that, or because of their goodwill and that of an apostle or disciple who prepares them for Me.

• Discipleship - Following Jesus Christ
• Force
• Goodwill
• Holiness
• Homicide - Murder - Assassination
• Honesty
• Kindness
• Mercy and forgiveness
• Paganism and pagans
• Patience
• Reproach
• Severity - Intransigence - Toughness
• Soul
• Virility
• Will
• Work
• haste - haste

Keep wolves away from your hearts. Wicked men are wolves: they seduce you and incite you to evil actions by Satan’s order and it is Satan himself who induces you to sin so that he may tear you to pieces. Be watchful.

• Acts - Actions
• Discernment
• Sin
• Temptation
• Vigilance
• Words of wisdom

The presence of a child amongst you should influence every action of yours through the holy restraint of respect for a child.

• Acts - Actions
• Words of wisdom