List of points

You were in a place where they were talking and listening to music. Prayer welled up in your soul, bringing an unspeakable solace. In the end you said: “Jesus, I don’t want consolation; I want you.”

I will never share the opinion — though I respect it — of those who separate prayer from active life, as if they were incompatible.

We children of God have to be contemplatives: people who, in the midst of the din of the throng, know how to find silence of soul in a lasting conversation with Our Lord, people who know how to look at him as they look at a Father, as they look at a Friend, whom they love madly.

Our being children of God, I insist, leads us to have a contemplative spirit in the midst of all human activities; to be light, salt and leaven through our prayer, through our mortification, through our knowledge of religion and of our profession. We will carry out this aim: the more within the world we are, the more we must be God’s.

You have received God’s call to a specific way: it is to be at all the crossroads of the world, while you remain — doing your professional work — in God.