I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God's idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us.

Christ used the flesh and blood of Mary for his life on earth, the Word of love was uttered in her heartbeat. Christ used his own body to utter his love on earth; his perfectly real body, with bone and sinew and blood and tears; Christ uses our bodies to express his love on earth, our humanity. A Christian life is a sacramental life, it is not a life lived only in the mind, only by the soul... Our humanity is the substance of the sacramental life of Christ in us, like the wheat for the host, like the grape for the chalice.

We are only syllables of the perfect Word.

The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.

Christ subjected himself to the law of the seed in the earth, to the law of rest and growth. He was "one of the children of the year," growing through rest, secret in his mothers womb, receiving the warmth of the sun through her, living the life of dependence, helplessness, littleness, darkness, and silence which, by a mystery of the Eternal Law, is the life of natural growth.

Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat.... the flowers under your feet are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only: "See how I love you."

Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.