List of points

Prayer is the foundation of the spiritual edifice. Prayer is all-powerful.

A change! You say you need a change!… opening your eyes wide so as to take in better the images of things, or almost closing them because you are short-sighted.

Close them altogether! Have interior life, and you will see, in undreamt-of colour and relief, the wonders of a better world, of a new world: and you will draw close to God…, and know your weakness…, and be deified… with a deification which, by bringing you nearer to your Father, will make you more a brother of your fellow-men.

The plants lay hidden under the snow. And the farmer, the owner of the land, observed with satisfaction: 'Now they are growing on the inside.'

I thought of you: of your forced inactivity…

Tell me: are you too growing 'on the inside'?

'What shapes and gives life to the roots and branches is the sap, which always works on the inside.'

Your friend who wrote these words knew that you were nobly ambitious. And he showed you the way: discretion and sacrifice — 'working on the inside'!

Outside events have placed you in voluntary confinement, worse perhaps, because of its circumstances, than the confinement of a prison. You have suffered an eclipse of your personality.

On all sides you feel yourself hemmed in: selfishness, curiosity, misunderstanding, people talking behind your back. All right: so what? Have you forgotten your free-will and that power of yours as a 'child'? The absence of flowers and leaves (external action) does not exclude the growth and activity of the roots (interior life).

Work: things will change, and you will yield more fruit than before, and sweeter too.

Hurrying, hurrying! Working, working! Feverish activity, anxiety to be up and doing. Marvellous material structures…

Where spiritual things are concerned: broken up boxes, cheap cotton, painted cardboard, hurrying, working! And many people running here and there.

It is because in their work they think only of 'today'; their vision is limited to what is 'present'. You must see things with the eyes of eternity, 'keeping present' what has passed and what has yet to come…

Calmness. Peace. Intense life within you. Without that wild hurry, without that frenzy for change, you can work from your proper place in life. And, like a powerful generator of spiritual electricity, you will give light and energy to very many, without losing your own vigour and light.