List of points

When contemplating the scene of the Incarnation, strengthen in your soul the resolve to be “humble in practice”. See how he lowered himself, taking on our poor nature.

—That is why every day you need to react, right away, with God’s grace, accepting — and wanting — the humiliations the Lord may offer you.

If the outlook in your interior life, in your soul, is darkened, allow yourself to be led along by the hand, as a blind man would do.

—In time the Lord will reward this humble surrendering of your own judgement by giving you clarity of mind.

You are full of concern because you do not love as you ought. Everything annoys you. And the enemy does all he can to make you show your bad temper.

—I realise you feel very humiliated. Precisely because of this you must take measures to react without delay.

Serving and forming children, caring lovingly for the sick.

To make ourselves understood by simple souls, we have to humble our intelligence; to understand poor sick people we have to humble our heart. In this way, on our knees in both intellect and body, it is easy to reach Jesus along that sure way of human wretchedness, of our own wretchedness. It will lead us to make ‘a nothing’ of ourselves in order to let God build on our nothingness.

Mary’s humble song of joy, the Magnificat, recalls to our minds the infinite generosity of the Lord towards those who become like children, towards those who abase themselves and are sincerely aware that they are nothing.

Listen to me, my child: you must be happy when people treat you badly and dishonour you, when many come out against you excitedly and it becomes the done thing to spit on you, because you are omnium peripsema, like the refuse of the world.

—It’s hard, it’s very hard. It is hard, until at last a man goes to the Tabernacle, seeing himself thought of as the scum of the earth, like a wretched worm, and says with all his heart “Lord, if you don’t need my good name, what do I want it for?”

Up to then even that son of God does not know what happiness is — up to that point of nakedness and self-giving, which is a self-giving of love, but founded on mortification, on sorrow.

You can do so much good, and so much harm!

—You will do good if you are humble and you give yourself cheerfully, with a spirit of sacrifice: good for yourself and for your fellow men, and for that good Mother, the Church.

—And how much harm if you allow yourself to be led by your pride.

This is the sure way: through humiliation to the Cross; then, from the Cross, with Christ, to the immortal Glory of the Father.

How much I savoured the epistle of that day! The Holy Spirit through Saint Paul teaches us the secret of immortality and of Glory. All of us human beings yearn to live on.

We would wish to make those moments in our lives when we are happy last forever. We would wish the memory of our deeds to be glorified. We would like our cherished ideals to become immortal. And so it is that when we seem to be happy, when something consoles us in our distress, we all naturally say and desire that it should last forever, forever.

Oh the wisdom of the devil! How well he knew the human heart. You will be like gods, he said to our first parents. That was a cruel deception. Saint Paul in this Epistle to the Philippians teaches us a divine secret by which to attain immortality and Glory: Jesus… emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the Cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him a name which is above every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in Heaven and on earth and under the earth…