Your friend is right in indicating that you may need to do more than pray set prayers, you need to be you with God, but no one but you and God knows how much you put into your prayers, how much they mean between you and God, so please don’t give them up!
Please keep up the Hours, the prayer of the Church, of numerous saints throughout the ages, of innumerable holy priests and Religious. In faithfully praying with them you are untied in the Communion of Saints, and of the Mystical Body of Christ…and immersed in the holy word of God! Oh yes, you will find God there, whatever you feel at any time, know that you are in the holiest company is your praying of the hours!!!
As I said, and I think she means, we need to allow time to be ourselves with God, go to God with all we are good and bad, weak and strong, our whole human reality, honestly, humbly, trustingly, and sincerity.
In response to a novice who was discouraged by her faults, Therese said*, “You make me think of a little child that is learning to stand but does not know how to walk. In his desire to reach to top of the stairs to find his mother, he lifts his little foot to climb the first step. It is all in vain, and at each renewed effort he falls.” “Well, be like that little child. Always keep lifting your foot to climb the ladder of holiness, and do not imagine that you can mount even the first step. All God asks of you is good will. From the top of the ladder, He looks lovingly upon you, and soon, touched by your fruitful efforts, He will Himself come down, and taking you in His arms, will carry you to His Kingdom never again to leave Him. But should you cease to raise your foot, you will be left for long on the earth.” *
**To another, Therese **
said, “You want to climb the mountain, whereas God wishes you to descend it. He is awaiting you in the valley of humility.” “It seems to me that humility is truth (honesty).”
Therese Martin has inspired generations of individuals to live the gospel way of spiritual childhood, including her family. In Celine Martin’s “Counsels and Reminiscences”, we note that while Therese died a saint at twenty-four, Celine strove against her imperfections until her holy death in her ninetieth year. Celine remained pupil of her young sister. When Therese, as her novice mistress, warned Celine what form her spiritual struggle would take, she might have been speaking any of us. **“You must never believe, when you don’t practice virtue, that it is due to some natural cause like illness, time, or grief. You must draw a great lesson in humility from it and take your place among the little souls, since you are able to practice virtue onl
y in such a feeble manner.”
Therese added,
“What is necessary for you now is not to practice heroic virtues but to acquire humility. For that, your victories must of necessity always be mixed with failures, so that you cannot take any pleasure in thinking about them.”**
Celine wrote of her struggle *
“with the faults that constantly kept me in a state of humiliation, for, due to my impulsive temperament, I often had little outbursts with the sisters that afflicted me a great deal on account of my self-love. I thought my exterior was deceiving, that I was better than I appeared to be: from that, I developed a certain frustration at not being judged at my true worth. Then my little sister endeavoured, by her penetrating instruction embellished with symbolic stories adapted to my circumstances, to make me love the shame I was in.” “She made me find my joy in believing that I was a ‘very little soul’ whom God constantly had to support because it was nothing but weakness and imperfection.” *
also copied from my journal]
Elizabeth, I hope you find some inspiration in the words of this little yet great saint.
