Jacques Philippe > Quotes

“No circumstance in the world can ever prevent us from believing in God, from placing all our trust in him, from loving him with our whole heart, or from loving our neighbor. Faith, hope, and charity are absolutely free, because if they are rooted in us deeply enough, they are able to draw strength from whatever opposes them! If someone sought to prevent us from believing by persecuting us, we always would retain the option of forgiving our enemies and transforming the situation of oppression into one of greater love. If someone tried to silence our faith by killing us, our deaths would be the best possible proclamation of our faith! Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Ultimately, we can really forgive people only because Christ rose from the dead; his Resurrection is the guarantee that God can cure every wrong and every hurt.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“In order to resist fear and discouragement, it is necessary that through prayer - through a personal experience of God re-encountered, recognized and loved in prayer - we taste and see how good the Lord is (Psalm 34).”
― Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart

“There are two things to be aware of if the fight against evil inclinations is to have any chance of success. First, our efforts will never be sufficient on their own. Only the grace of Christ can win us the victory. Therefore our chief weapons are prayer, patience, and hope. Second, one passion can only be cured by another - a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person's calling.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“The highest and most fruitful form of human freedom is found in accepting, even more than in dominating. We show the greatness of our freedom when we transform reality, but still more when we accept it trustingly as it is given to us day after day.
It is natural and easy to go along with pleasant situations that arise without our choosing them. It becomes a problem, obviously, when things are unpleasant, go against us, or make us suffer. But it is precisely then that, in order to become truly free, we are often called to choose to accept what we did not want, and even what we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here: one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!
To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“This is why humility, spiritual poverty, is so precious: it locates our identity securely in the one place where it will be safe from all harm. If our treasure is in God, no one can take it from us. Humility is truth. I am what I am in God’s eyes: a poor child who possesses absolutely nothing, who receives everything, infinitely loved and totally free. I have received everything in advance from the freely bestowed love of my Father, who said to me definitively: “All that is mine is yours.”5”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Faith and hope are provisional; they exist only for this earth and will pass away. In heaven, faith will be replaced by sight, and hope by possession; only love will never pass away.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“I’m not going to spend my life denouncing sin. That would be doing it too much honor. I would rather encourage good than condemn evil.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Consider the surface of a lake, above which the sun is shining. If the surface of the lake is peaceful and tranquil, the sun will be reflected in this lake; and the more peaceful the lake, the more perfectly will it be reflected. If, on the contrary, the surface of the lake is agitated, undulating, then the image of the sun can not be reflected in it. It is a little bit like this with regard to our soul in relationship to God. The more our soul is peaceful and tranquil, the more God is reflected in it, the more His image expresses itself in us, the more His grace acts through us.”
― Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace

“The human heart is certainly an abyss of misery and sin, but God lies in its depths.”
― Jacques Philippe

“Resentment attacks our vital forces and does us much harm. When someone has made us suffer, our tendency is to keep the memory of the wrong alive in our minds, like a “bill” we will produce in due time to demand settlement. Those accumulated bills end up poisoning our lives. It is wiser to cancel every debt, as the Gospel invites us to. In return, we will be forgiven everything, and our hearts will be set free, whereas nurturing resentment toward others closes us to the positive things they could contribute to us.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“We do not have to become saints by our own power; we have to learn how to let God make us into saints.”
― Jacques Philippe, In the School of the Holy Spirit

“Christians are not people who follow a set of rules. Christians are, first and foremost, people who believe in God, hope for everything from him, and want to love him with all their hearts and to love their neighbors. The commandments, prayer, the sacraments, and all the graces that come from God (including the loftiest mystical experiences) have just one purpose: to increase our faith, hope, and love.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“One of the petitions we make to God most often should be: “Inspire me in all my decisions, and never let me neglect any of your inspirations.”
― Jacques Philippe, In the School of the Holy Spirit

“Even if you have suffered, even if you have sometimes been disappointed by life, even if, at certain times, you had the feeling that God was very far away (we all have this feeling when living through a time of trial) or had abandoned you, in spite of all of that, never doubt God’s love, never doubt his faithfulness.”
― Jacques Philippe, The Way of Trust and Love: A Retreat Guided by St. Therese of Lisieux

“Our Difficulty in Believing in Providence The first obstacle is that, as long as we have not experienced concretely the fidelity of Divine Providence to provide for our essential needs, we have difficulty believing in it and we abandon it. We have hard heads, the words of Jesus do not suffice for us, we want to see at least a little in order to believe! Well, we do not see it operating around us in a clear manner. How, then, are we to experience it? It is important to know one thing: We cannot experience this support from God unless we leave Him the necessary space in which He can express Himself. I would like to make a comparison. As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out into the void, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. And so it is in spiritual life: “God gives in the measure that we expect of Him,” says Saint John of the Cross. And Saint Francis de Sales says: “The measure of Divine Providence acting on us is the degree of confidence that we have in it.” This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken the leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God. The founders of religious orders proceed with the audacity of this spirit of faith. They buy houses without having a penny, they receive the poor although they have nothing with which to feed them. Then, God performs miracles for them. The checks arrive and the granaries are filled. But, too often, generations later, everything is planned, calculated. One doesn’t incur an expense without being sure in advance to have enough to cover it. How can Providence manifest itself? And the same is true in the spiritual life. If a priest drafts all his sermons and his talks, down to the least comma, in order to be sure that he does not find himself wanting before his audience, and never has the audacity to begin preaching with a prayer and confidence in God as his only preparation, how can he have this beautiful experience of the Holy Spirit, Who speaks through his mouth? Does the Gospel not say, …do not worry about how to speak or what you should say; for what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it will not be you who will be speaking, but the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you (Matthew 10:19)? Let us be very clear. Obviously we do not want to say that it is a bad thing to be able to anticipate things, to develop a budget or prepare one’s homilies. Our natural abilities are also instruments in the hands of Providence! But everything depends on the spirit in which we do things. We must clearly understand that there is an enormous difference in attitude of heart between one, who in fear of finding himself wanting because he does not believe in the intervention of God on behalf of those who lean on Him, programs everything in advance to the smallest detail and does not undertake anything except in the exact measure of its actual possibilities, and one who certainly undertakes legitimate things, but who abandons himself with confidence in God to provide all that is asked of him and who thus surpasses his own possibilities. And that which God demands of us always goes beyond our natural human possibilities!”
― Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace

“Real freedom does not mean being ruled by one’s impulses from one moment to the next. Just the opposite. Being free means not being a slave to one’s moods; it means being guided in a course of action by the fundamental choices one has made, choices one does not repudiate in the face of new circumstances.”
― Jacques Philippe, Time for God

“We should fight, not to attain holiness as a result of our own efforts, but to let God act in us without our putting up any resistance against him; we should fight to open ourselves as fully as possible to his grace, which sanctifies us.”
― Jacques Philippe, In the School of the Holy Spirit

“Love is also a decision. Sometimes it comes spontaneously, but very often loving people will mean choosing to love them. Otherwise love would be no more than emotion, even selfishness, and not something that engages our freedom.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“The sign of spiritual progress is not so much never falling as it is being able to lift oneself up quickly after one falls.”
― Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart

“True freedom is not so much something man wins for himself; it is a free gift from God, a fruit of the Holy Spirit, received in the measure in which we place ourselves in a relationship of loving dependence on our Creator and Savior. This is where the Gospel paradox is most apparent: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”7 In other words, people who wish to preserve and defend their own freedom at any cost will lose it, but those willing to “lose” it by leaving it trustingly in God’s hands will save it. Their freedom will be restored to them, infinitely more beautiful, infinitely deeper, as a marvelous gift from God’s tenderness. Our freedom is, in fact, proportionate to the love and childlike trust we have for our heavenly Father.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“There are many souls who think they do not have prayer, yet they have much; and, on the contrary, others who think they have much prayer but have very little.”
― Jacques Philippe, Thirsting for Prayer

“God would spare us, if He could, all these trials, but they are necessary in order that we should be convinced of our complete powerlessness to do good by ourselves.”
― Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace

“Our Lord is always ready to lift us up again when we fall, and he even finds a way to make our falls beneficial to us if after them we turn back to him with a humble, trusting heart.”
― Jacques Philippe, In the School of the Holy Spirit

“The more God is at the center of our lives, and the more we expect everything from him and him alone, the better chance our human relationships will have of being well-balanced and happy.”
― Jacques Philippe, Thirsting for Prayer

“Learning to give and receive freely requires a long, laborious process of re-educating our minds, which have been conditioned by thousands of years of struggle for survival.16 The violent entry of divine revelation and the Gospel into the world is like an evolutionary ferment, intended to make our psychology “evolve” toward an attitude of free giving and free receiving—the attitude of the Kingdom because it is the attitude of love. This is a process of divinization, whose final goal is to love as God loves: “You must be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”17 And this divinization, this becoming God-like, means becoming human in the truest sense! It is a marvelous, liberating evolution: but we can only enter into the new way of being through the destruction of many of our natural behaviors, a sort of death-agony.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“The Lord can leave us wanting relative to certain things (sometimes judged indispensable in the eyes of the world), but He never leaves us deprived of what is essential: His presence, His peace and all that is necessary for the complete fulfillment of our lives, according to His plans for us.”
― Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart

“God calls us to perfection, but he is not a perfectionist. And perfection is reached not so much by external conformity to an ideal as by inner faithfulness to God’s inspirations.”
― Jacques Philippe, In the School of the Holy Spirit

“our inability to love comes most often from our lack of faith and our lack of hope.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“the more we confidently entrust the future to God, without trying to know it or master it, the more secure and peaceful we are.”
― Jacques Philippe, Called to Life