Daily Thought For August 2, 2018

Drawing From Our Storeroom

Here is what I want you to do…to love God’s goodness within yourself, and his immeasurable charity, which you will find in the cell of self-knowledge. In this cell you will find God. For just as God holds within himself everything that shares in being, so you will find within yourself memory, which holds and is well-suited to hold the treasure of God’s blessing. There too you will find understanding, which makes us sharers in the wisdom of God’s Son by understanding and knowing his will, a will that wants nothing but that we be made holy. When we see this, our soul cannot be sad or shaken, no matter what happens, for we know that everything is done with God’s providence and tremendous love….

Getting back to self-knowledge: I tell you, you will also find there the gentle mercy of the Holy Spirit, the aspect of God that gives and is nothing but love. Whatever the Spirit does is done because of love. And this movement of love you will find within your own soul, because our will is nothing but love, and its every affection and movement comes from nothing but love. It loves or hates whatever the eye of understanding has seen and understood.

How true it is then…that within the cell of your soul you will find the whole of God. And he bestows such sweetness, refreshment, and consolation that no matter what may happen we cannot be shaken, because we have been made big enough to hold God’s own will. How? By getting rid of all selfish love, by getting rid of everything that is not God’s will.

Saint Catherine of Siena