List of points

Calmly, without scruples, you should think about your life, and ask forgiveness, and make a firm, specific and well-defined resolution to improve in one point and another: in that small detail which you find hard, and in that other one which usually you don’t carry out as you should, and you know it.

You shouldn’t be so easy on yourself! Don’t wait until the New Year to make your resolutions. Every day is a good day to make good decisions. Hodie, nunc! — Today, now!

It tends to be the poor defeatist types who leave it until the New Year before beginning afresh… And even then, they never really begin.

There is but one fatal illness, one deadly mistake you can make: to settle for defeat, not to know how to fight with the spirit of a child of God. If this personal effort is lacking, the soul becomes paralysed and languishes alone, and is incapable of bearing fruit.

—Such cowardice on man’s part puts pressure on Our Lord to utter those words addressed to him by the paralytic at the pool of Bethsaida, hominem non habeo! — I have no man to help me.

—What a pity if Jesus does not find in you the man or the woman he expects!

The ascetical struggle is not something negative and therefore hateful, but rather a joyful affirmation. It is a sport.

A good sportsman doesn’t fight to gain just one victory, and that at the first attempt. He has to build himself up for it, training over a long period of time, calmly and confidently. He keeps trying again and again, and if he doesn’t succeed at the first attempt, he keeps on trying with determination until the obstacle is overcome.

Along the way to personal sanctity we can at times get the impression that we are going backwards instead of forwards, that we are getting worse instead of better.

As long as there is interior struggle this pessimistic thought is only an illusion, a deception to be rejected as false.

—Persevere and don’t worry. If you fight with tenacity you are making progress and are growing in sanctity.

You said to me: “I seem not only unable to go ahead along my way, but also unable to be saved without a miracle of grace. Oh, my poor soul! I remain cold and, what is worse, almost indifferent. It’s as if I were an outsider looking at ‘a case’ (mine) which had nothing to do with him. Will these days turn out to be completely futile?

And nevertheless, my Mother is my Mother and Jesus is — dare I say it? — my Jesus. And there are good and saintly souls, at this very moment, praying for me.”

—Go on walking hand in hand with your Mother, I replied, and “dare” to say to Jesus that he is yours. In his goodness he will bring clear light to your soul.

For a son of God each day should be an opportunity for renewal, knowing for sure that with the help of grace he will reach the end of the road, which is Love.

That is why if you begin and begin again, you are doing well. If you have a will to win, if you struggle, then, with God’s help, you will conquer! There will be no difficulty you cannot overcome!

All contrite you told me: “How much wretchedness I see in myself! I am so stupid and I am carting around such a weight of concupiscence that it is as though I had never really done anything to get closer to God. O Lord, here I am beginning, beginning, always just beginning! I will try, however, to push forward each day with all my heart.”

—May he bless those efforts of yours.

Father, you told me, I have committed many errors, I have made so many mistakes.

—I know, I replied. But God Our Lord, who also knows all that and has taken it into account, only asks you to be humble enough to admit it and asks that you struggle to make amends, so as to serve him better each day with more interior life, with continual prayer and with piety, and making use of the proper means to sanctify your work.

Spiritual life is — and I repeat this again and again, on purpose — a constant beginning and beginning again.

—Beginning again? Yes! Every time you make an act of contrition — and we should make many every day — you begin again, because you offer a new love to God.

Your life cannot be the repetition of actions which are all the same, because the next one should be more upright, more effective, more full of love than the last. Each day should mean new light, new enthusiasm — for Him!