Brief Meditations

“Every mystery that is penetrated along Christ’s path conceals countless others within itself; the more you study it, the more mysterious the whole appears; conversely, everything is thus so clear for simple souls because they are ready from the beginning to accommodate all mysteries in themselves and do not wish to touch them.

God has given us everything; we do not know that until we give everything back to Him. And, once we are completely emptied out, we are still filled with what is always only His, so that we can never measure the greatness of His gifts.

There is only one way to defend yourself against God: totally surrender and hand over all the keys. Every treaty we might try to make with Him after that would, by its own logic, diminish the gift He has made us in His Son.

Lord, if Your severity toward me really is the sign of Your indulgence with others, then do not listen to my weariness and my sighs; do not spare Your severity; lavish it on me, whatever I may object to it.

...The sword has two edges and cuts both ways. Sometimes it is love and yearning, sometimes it is despair, the wretchedness of sin. But it does not remain in mere alternation. Every step is contact, every contact becomes fuller knowledge of the whole, summing up and summed up.

...Every distance from You, Lord, makes us cry out for Your nearness; but if we stand by Your fire, about to be caught by it, we clamor loudly for cool refreshment. And this eternal longing for what we do not possess, this urgency about precisely what is not attainable, this breathless inward seesaw, being thrown to and fro, is supposed at every moment to look outwardly like perfect rest in You. Lord, help us to do that; we are unworthy, but let us fulfill the task nonetheless.

Annihilate me, Lord. And if You are pleased to restore me, so that I can somehow be useful to You, then only on one condition: that I no longer know myself and finally stop seeking myself.

Christ became so weak that He was able to carry the whole world; and we become so strong that we can only be carried.”

~Adrienne von Speyr (from Lumina – New Lumina)