Taste the hidden sweetness that lies within your heart which God has kept for those whose lives are tender within. Place your mind in the softness of life’s eternal flow. Place your soul in the brilliance of heaven’s endless glow; and love him totally who gave himself for your love, and you will hold him who holds all things in truth.
–Saint Clare of Assisi (1194-1253)
We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God´s compassionate love for others.
–Saint Clare of Assisi (1194-1253)
Happy the soul to whom it is given to attain this life with Christ, to cleave with all one’s heart to him whose beauty all the heavenly hosts behold forever, whose love inflames our love, the contemplation of whom is our refreshment, whose graciousness is our delight, whose gentleness fills us to overflowing, whose remembrance makes us glow with happiness, whose fragrance revives the dead, the glorious vision of whom will be the happiness of all the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem. For he is the brightness of eternal glory, the splendor of eternal light, the mirror without spot.
–Saint Clare of Assisi (1194-1253)
If, further, this good person would become an inward and spiritual man, he needs must have three further things. The first is a heart unencumbered with images; the second is spiritual freedom in his desires, the third is the feeling of inward union with God.
–Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381)
We ought always to be praying, or reading, or meditating, and doing other useful things, so that our enemy never finds us idle.
–Richard Rolle (c. 1300-1349)
Here is a way to tell when God has been born in you: everything will point to God. Nothing is a hindrance anymore. Everywhere you look, you will see God. It is like staring at the sun. The image is burned into your eyes. Regardless of where you look, you see the sun.
–Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)
