Status Updates From Raïssa's Journal

“It is not in Paradise that we will have to be just and pure, this is demanded of us today. It is on this earth that we must give our life, through love, to God and to every man who may have need of it.”

“Now must I vigil keep before the gates of self, / Of my own self, a closely-shuttered tower / Whose secret walls my Lord Himself has shaped, / And had not any light to guide His step.”

“I have nothing to give you. But my heart I have given you. I know that by the price it has cost me, I do not yield my heart to creatures, you keep it, you hold it sweetly enchained. I give it to you and continually regive it you. This poor and wretched heart. But which is my heart, the most personal possession I have to dispose of, I give it you.”

“When we feel our soul at once arid and over-sensitive, it is then that we must cry out to God. The divine Word who is beyond the reach of pain took a heart like to ours so as to be able, in suffering for us, to suffer with us! Like to ours, not in imperfection but in natural inclination. ‘As he took my will, so he took my sadness,’ St. Ambrose says magnificently.”

“Have pity on a very miserable being, on the one you see, not the one I see, or the one people see in me, but the one you see.”

“Will the Lord allow me for once in my life to fulfill a project?” REAL

“The disciples of Jesus are just as capable as they [“those who yield to all solicitations from below”] are of feeling pleasure and pain to the full. But, having chosen to go to God through all obstacles, they trample on their own heart if necessary.”

“The storm of temptation sweeps away all that is frail and lays bare the rock of faith. The soul lives then on humility, on obedience, in the absolute nakedness of faith.”

“The same disposition which makes us annihilate ourselves before God is that which He exacts from us to unite us to Himself.”

it’s so nice to read a journal written in a style so similar to my own! now i don’t feel so bad about not having a purely narrative style.