Diane

“If the mystery of the cross becomes the inner form of this science, a living energy that allows the soul to be molded by what is received from this mystery, it turns into a science of the cross . On the contrary, excessive interior preoccupation with one’s own personal concerns can develop in the course of life into a general indifference to things religious.”
― Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross

“The entirely comfortable being-at-home in the world, the satiety of pleasures that it offers, the demand for these pleasures and the matter-of-course consent to these demands—all of this that human nature considers bright daily life—all of this is darkness5 in God’s eyes and incompatible with the divine light. It has to be totally uprooted if room for God is to be made in the soul. Meeting this demand means engaging in battle with one’s own nature all along the line, taking up one’s cross and delivering oneself up to be crucified. Holy Father St. John here invokes the Lord’s saying in this connection: “Whoever does not renounce all that the will possesses cannot be my disciple” [Lk.”
― Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross

“So he writes for contemplative souls, and at a very particular point along their way he wants to take them by the hand, at a crossroad where most halt, perplexed, not knowing how to proceed.”
― Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross

“At first, after her conversion she thought she would have to renounce all that was secular and live totally immersed in God, but then she realized that, even in the contemplative life, you cannot sever all connection with the world, that the deeper you are drawn into God, the more you must go out of yourself to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.”
― Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross