"The Way" (VI)

Have only a few private devotions, but be constant in them.

Don’t forget your childhood prayers, learned perhaps from your mother’s lips. Say them each day with simplicity, as you did then.

Let us be slow to judge. Each one sees things from his own point of view and with his own mind, with all its limitations, through eyes that are often dimmed and clouded by passion. Moreover, like so many of those modern artists, some people have an outlook which is so subjective and so unhealthy that they make a few random strokes and assure us that these represent our portrait, our conduct. Of what little worth are the judgments of men! Don’t judge without sifting your judgment in prayer.

Force yourself, if necessary, always to forgive those who offend you, from the very first moment. For the greatest injury or offense you can suffer from them is nothing compared to what God has forgiven you.

Sorrow of love—because he is good; because he is your friend, who gave his life for you; because everything good you have is his, because you have offended him so much,… because he has forgiven you. He? Forgiven you! Weep, my son, with sorrow of love.

To criticize, to destroy, is not difficult; the clumsiest laborer knows how to drive his pick into the noble and finely-hewn stone of a cathedral. To construct—that is what requires the skill of a master.

Charity consists not so much in giving as in understanding. That’s why you should seek an excuse for your neighbor—there are always excuses—if yours is the duty to judge.

Serve your God straightforwardly; be faithful to him, and don’t worry about anything else. For it’s a great truth that if you “seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, all other things”—material things, the means—“will be given you besides.” He will provide them for you.

Cast away that despair produced by the realization of your weakness. It’s true: financially you are a zero, and socially another zero, and another in virtues, and another in talent… But to the left of these zeros is Christ… And what an immeasurable figure it turns out to be!

You realize you are weak. And so, indeed, you are. In spite of all that—rather, because of it—God has sought you. He always uses inadequate instruments so that the work may be seen to be his. From you he asks only docility.