Mary Claire’s Reviews > The Journal of Raïssa Maritain > Status Update

“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.”