A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living

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A YEAR WITH THE MYSTICS

The Daily Readings

DAY 1

Entering into the light

We simply want to see as God sees. That’s the work of eternity. Let’s get started already.

God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

—1 John 1:5–10

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Am I ready to walk entirely in the light? Do I want that to be the way I live my life, every day, every hour, every minute, every second? Breathing in and out God’s Word, which is my life, which gives me life?

CLOSING PRAYER

Make me your light, Lord—all light, all yours.

DAY 2

Fathoming the depths of the profundity of God

Prayer is really an endless journey. Thanks be to God for so many companions along the way.

The holy virgin told her confessors, of whom, though unworthy, I was one, that at the beginning of her visions, that is to say when the Lord Jesus Christ first began to appear to her, he once came to her while she was praying and said, Do you know, daughter, who you are, and who I am? If you know these two things, you will be blessed. You are she who is not; whereas I am he who is. Have this knowledge in your soul and the Enemy will never deceive you and you will escape all his wiles; you will never disobey my commandments and will acquire all grace, truth, and light.

Small words, yet great in value. A succinct doctrine, yet in its way endless! Oh, immeasurable wisdom, wrapped in a few brief syllables, however shall I understand you, who will help me to break your seals? How shall I fathom the depths of your profundity? Perhaps this is that length and breadth, that height and depth, that the Apostle Paul longed to comprehend with all the saints of Ephesus [3:8]? Or perhaps it is one with the Charity of Christ, transcending all human wisdom?

—Blessed Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I know God? Do I know who I am in his light? Am I prepared to see?

CLOSING PRAYER

Prepare me, O Lord, for every blessed thing you have to show me. Anoint me with your holy wisdom so that I may love as you love.

DAY 3

With all your heart

Do you pray with an eager and receptive love? Full of thanks and praise? The psalms capture the life of the soul, and this one might help you settle into new routines and experiences of prayer.

My heart is steadfast, O God,

my heart is steadfast!

I will sing and make melody!

Awake, my soul!

Awake, O harp and lyre!

I will awake the dawn!

I will give thanks to you, O LORD, among the peoples,

I will sing praises to you among the nations.

For your steadfast love is great above the heavens,

your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!

Let your glory be over all the earth!

—Psalms 108:1–5

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Does the psalmist describe the state of my heart? Do I desire this? Come back to this when you are feeling spiritually sluggish or tempted to despair. God works with a ready heart.

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, make me desire only your glory and praise. I want to be all love and thanksgiving in your most holy name.

DAY 4

Who do you belong to?

Our identity as Christians is clear, and yet does that play out in how we live our lives? In Scripture, we not only see how Jesus lives but how he prays. May these meditations throughout lead to more of us living Trinitarian lives.

Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me; I have guarded them, and none of them was lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you; and these things I speak in the world, that they may have joy in themselves. I have given them your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not pray that you take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth.

—John 17:11–19

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

You do not belong to the world. Do you live as though you do?

CLOSING PRAYER

Dear Lord, may this journey of prayer make me more like you, ready to live with you in heaven even while here, showing people your merciful love by the way I see you in them and keep raising my eyes to heaven and seeing you here.

DAY 5

Loving love himself

St. Bernard writes of the Song of Songs and the mutual longing of the bride and the bridegroom. We, the baptized, are loved by God in this way. It’s understandably a favorite topic of that twelfth-century Cistercian abbot. It’s irresistible! So is our God. Why let anything stand in the way of being loved and loving in this way?

When God loves, all he desires is to be loved in return; the sole purpose of his love is to be loved, in the knowledge that those who love him are made happy by their love of him.

The Bridegroom’s love, or rather the love which is the Bridegroom, asks in return nothing but faithful love. Let the beloved, then, love in return. Should not a bride love, and above all, Love’s bride? Could it be that Love not be loved?

—Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon on the Song of Songs

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I ever pray about the implications and significance in my life of the intimate love God has for my soul?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, I don’t know the depths of your love, but I want to love you as I ought. Free me to enter into the depths of this love for the sake of justice and truth and my immortal soul as well as the souls of everyone I encounter today and every day. Lord, show me your love. Help me to love you completely in return.

DAY 6

We must love

This is the only just way given God’s love for us, all that he has done for us.

I ask you to love me with the same love with which I love you. But for me, you cannot do this, for I loved you without being loved.… So you cannot give me the kind of love I ask of you. This is why I have put you among your neighbors so that you can do for them what you cannot do for me, that is, love them without any concern for thanks and without looking for any profit for yourself. And whatever you do for them I will consider done for me.

—God the Father to Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Are there people I find it impossible to love?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, help me to look with your gaze of love on every person, especially those I find it hardest to love.

DAY 7

Idols be gone

The establishment of the dwelling place of God within.

The true adorer follows his Master even unto the entire abnegation of himself, practicing to the letter all that our Lord Jesus tells him, when He says: If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. This way thus marked out is widely thrown open to all who are baptized; and if we persevere in thus following our Savior, it will lead us to that perfection which will fulfill our heavenly Father’s desire in our regard.

But above all things we must be convinced that no one can pretend to be an adorer in spirit and in truth if he has not resolutely broken with all idolatry. Now idolatry, if we are to believe the Apostle, is not confined to the worship of false gods. We can raise within ourselves many idols, and blindly offer sacrifice to them: For know ye this and understand that no fornicator, or unclean or covetous person (which is a serving of idols) hath inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

To be true adorers we must have destroyed all these idols, we must have entirely purified our hearts of them, and have established within ourselves the dwelling place of God: For you are temples of the living God, as God saith: I will dwell in them, and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.

—Mother Cécile Bruyère

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Is Jesus my only Lord or do I let myself be enslaved by things of this world?

CLOSING PRAYER

Free me from all idols, my Lord, so that I truly belong to you alone.

DAY 8

The mystical life for times like these

Our world needs us to be for real about prayer.

Is it not one of the signs of the times that in today’s world, despite widespread secularization, there is a widespread demand for spirituality, a demand which expresses itself in large part as a renewed need for prayer? Other religions, which are now widely present in ancient Christian lands, offer their own responses to this need, and sometimes they do so in appealing ways. But we who have received the grace of believing in Christ, the revealer of the Father and the Savior of the world, have a duty to show to what depths the relationship with Christ can lead.

The great mystical tradition of the Church of both East and West has much to say in this regard. It shows how prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved, vibrating at the Spirit’s touch, resting filially within the Father’s heart. This is the lived experience of Christ’s promise: He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him (Jn 14:21). It is a journey totally sustained by grace, which nonetheless demands an intense spiritual commitment and is no stranger to painful purifications (the dark night). But it leads, in various possible ways, to the ineffable joy experienced by the mystics as nuptial union.…

Yes, dear brothers and sisters, our Christian communities must become genuine schools of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly falls in love. Intense prayer, yes, but it does not distract us from our commitment to history: by opening our heart to the love of God it also opens it to the love of our brothers and sisters, and makes us capable of shaping history according to God’s plan.

—Pope St. John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Can I increase the time I spend in prayer?

CLOSING PRAYER

I do want to live as your faithful servant, O Lord, in the world today. Let my prayer only increase my love for you.

DAY 9

Our Christian duty

In his inaugural homily, Pope St. John Paul II talked about gazing upon Christ to know our identity in him.

Our time calls us, urges us, obliges us to gaze on the Lord and immerse ourselves in humble and devout meditation on the mystery of the supreme power of Christ himself.

He who was born of the Virgin Mary, the carpenter’s Son (as he was thought to be), the Son of the living God (confessed by Peter), came to make us all a kingdom of priests.

The Second Vatican Council has reminded us of the mystery of this power and of the fact that Christ’s mission as Priest, Prophet-Teacher, and King continues in the Church. Everyone, the whole People of God, shares in this threefold mission. Perhaps in the past, the tiara, this triple crown, was placed on the Pope’s head in order to express by that symbol the Lord’s plan for his Church, namely that all the hierarchical order of Christ’s Church, all sacred power exercised in the Church, is nothing other than service, service with a single purpose: to ensure that the whole People of God shares in this threefold mission of Christ and always remains under the power of the Lord; a power that has its source not in the powers of this world but in the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection.

The absolute and yet sweet and gentle power of the Lord responds to the whole depths of the human person, to his loftiest aspirations of intellect, will, and heart. It does not speak the language of force but expresses itself in charity and truth.

—Pope St. John Paul II, inaugural homily, October 22, 1978

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I think of myself as a servant?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, show me who I really am in your love. I want to know you and love you and serve you and your people.

DAY 10

We are of God

Our hearts are being moved constantly. We need to be constantly thinking about Christ so that there is no time or space for the damned devil. We need to see God as he truly is and ourselves in his light. Letting our relationship with God be nourished in the sacraments will make all the difference.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already. Little children, you are of God, and have overcome them; for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are of the world, therefore what they say is of the world, and the world listens to them. We are of God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and he who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

—1 John 4:1–6

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I know myself as one of God’s beloved?

CLOSING PRAYER

You are my Father, God, help me to know your love and let your embrace be my starting point in all things I set out to do.

DAY 11

Open wide the doors for Christ!

How many times do we have to hear do not be afraid to believe the power we have in Christ?

Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power. Help the Pope and all those who wish to serve Christ and with Christ’s power to serve the human person and the whole of mankind. Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic, and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization, and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows what is in man. He alone knows it.

So often today man does not know what is within him, in the depths of his mind and heart. So often he is uncertain about the meaning of his life on this earth. He is assailed by doubt, a doubt which turns into despair. We ask you therefore, we beg you with humility and trust, let Christ speak to man. He alone has words of life, yes, of eternal life.

—Pope St. John Paul II, inaugural homily, October 22, 1978

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

What holds me back from holy boldness?

CLOSING PRAYER

Jesus Christ, you alone know. Free me from the chains that bind me.

DAY 12

The martyrdom of Mary

Every pain that ever is or was or will be, our Blessed Mother suffered. May we stay at the foot of the cross with her. Fr. Faber here can help us truly let her be our mother.

The sorrows of Mary were immense, in that they were beyond the power of human endurance. They went beyond the measure of the natural strength of life.… Her beautiful life … would have been … extinguished by excess of sorrow, unless God had worked a perpetual miracle to hinder this effect.…

Her sorrows went up into regions of sublimity, of which we can form only the vaguest conceptions. They went down into profound depths of soul, which we cannot explore because they have no parallel in ourselves. They were heightened by the unappreciable perfection of her nature, by the exuberant abundance of her grace, by the exceeding beauty of Jesus, and above all by His Divinity.…

Her compassion was part of the great epic of creation, a pathos and a plaintiveness not to be disjoined from the sublimities and terrors and sacred panics of the Passion of the Incarnate Word. But it is not touching poetry of which we are in search. Rather it is plain piety, and a downright increase of love of Mary, and a devotion to her Son.… Let then the exceeding beauty of Mary’s martyrdom find us out, if it will, and catch us up into the air, and surprise us into sweet tears, and calm the trouble of our doctrinal, devotional way for it.

—Father Frederick William Faber, The Foot of the Cross

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I think about the sorrows of Mary? Do I bring her my sorrows?

CLOSING PRAYER

Mary, there is nothing I will experience in life that you have not wept tears for. Help me see the love you have for your Son, humanity, and me—every bit as much of your child as Jesus and the beloved apostle, John. Help me to look to you and love with your perfect heart, which leads straight to the Heart of your Son. Thank you, Mary. What love! What sorrow! What a reality I want to love in.

DAY 13

For grace, we are made

The more aware we are of the supernatural and the more we mature in the spiritual life, truly living in relationship with the three divine persons, the more the soul already possesses that life of the world beyond the grave.

Grace is nothing else than a beginning of glory in us.…

The grace of the Holy Ghost which we have at present, although unequal to glory in act, is equal to it virtually as the seed of a tree, wherein the whole tree is virtually.

—Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I think of my life sacramentally? How often do I go to the Lord in the sacraments?

Your grace is enough, O Lord, my God. Help me realize your daily outpourings more and more.

CLOSING PRAYER

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

DAY 14

Our lives in time and eternity

The mystical life is the integrated Catholic life.

The full life of the Spirit … is … declared to be active, contemplative, ascetic and apostolic; though nowadays we express these abiding human dispositions in other and less formidable terms. If we translate them as work, prayer, self-discipline and social service they do not look quite so bad. But even so, what a tremendous program to put before the ordinary human creature, and how difficult it looks when thus arranged! That balance to be discovered and held between due contact with this present living world of time, and due renunciation of it. That continual penetration of the time-world with the Spirit of Eternity.

—Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Is this the life I want to live?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, bring my everything into your everything. May I be radiant with your redemptive grace.

DAY 15

Transcendent me

The mystical life is not about swooning for the sake of swooning—a flowery romanticization of faith or an escape—but loving as the reason for our lives. God will reveal himself to us as he wills as long as we give him the time.

Seek first the Kingdom of God, said Jesus, and all the rest shall be added to you. … Let nothing, says Thomas à Kempis, be great or high or acceptable to thee but purely God; … Our whole teaching, says Boehme, is nothing else than how man should kindle in himself God’s light-world. I do not say that such a presentation of it makes the personal spiritual life any easier: nothing does that. But it does make its central implicit rather clearer, shows us at once its difficulty and its simplicity; since it depends on the consistent subordination of every impulse and every action to one regnant aim and interest—in other words, the unification of the whole self round one center, the highest conceivable by man. Each of man’s behavior-cycles is always directed towards some end, of which he may or may not be visibly conscious. But in that perfect unification of the self which is characteristic of the life of the Spirit, all his behavior is brought into one stream of purpose, and directed towards one, transcendent end. And this simplification means for him a release from conflicting wishes, and so a tremendous increase of power.

—Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Is my behavior directed towards one, transcendent end; that is, God?

CLOSING PRAYER

However you want me to see you and live you, take my life, Lord, and order it as you will.

DAY 16

The unseen seen

When we talk about the peace of Christ, it starts in seeing God in the everyday and the unexpected. The mystical life is about seeing with the new eyes of grace that we were given in Baptism but don’t always use.

Without some manifestation, however imperfect it might be, of the ineffable mysteries of the divine life in souls, there would be in the world nothing but lying and confusion. Therefore the soul illumined by the light from on high cannot be silent. Love inflames it to the point of making it overcome all obstacles in order to diffuse the fruits of ineffable peace which the God of all consolation produces in it (II Cor.1). This will happen all the more when the soul sees men foolishly lost in the search for worldly pleasures which are incompatible with their future immortal glorification.

—Saint Catherine of Genoa, The Spiritual Dialogue

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Can I see God in hidden ways in the world? Do I believe he is always present?

CLOSING PRAYER

God, make your love known to me in everything at every time. Inflame my love and gratitude for you even when I do not feel your presence. Help me grow in confident knowledge of your providential love.

DAY 17

The secret to everything!

We have photos of her. Maybe you, like me, were even in her presence. Mother Teresa holds nothing back. And she tells us how to do the same.

My secret is quite simple. I pray.

It was the Apostles who asked Jesus: Jesus, teach us how to pray, because they saw him so often pray and they knew that he was talking to his Father. What those hours of prayer must have been we know only from the continual love of Jesus for his Father, My Father! And he taught his disciples a very simple way of talking to God himself.

Before Jesus came, God was great in his majesty, great in his creation. And then when Jesus came, he became one of us, because his Father and he wanted us to learn to pray by loving one another as the Father has loved him.

I love you, he kept on saying; as the Father loved you; love him. And his love was the Cross, his love was the Bread of Life. And he wants us to pray with a clean heart, with a simple heart, with a humble heart. Unless you become little children, you cannot learn to pray, you cannot enter heaven, you cannot see God. To become a little child means to be at peace with the Father, Our Father.

Prayer is nothing but being in the family, being one with the Father in the Son and the Holy Spirit – the love of the Father for his Son and the Holy Spirit. And the love – our love for the Father, through Jesus, his Son, filled with the Holy Spirit – is our union with God and the fruit of that union with God, the fruit of that prayer, what we call prayer. We have given it that name but actually prayer is nothing but that oneness with Christ.

—Saint Teresa of Calcutta, talk on prayer, June 8, 1980

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

In this world, full of wounds, noise, distraction, temptation, the least-tried strategy is the solution. Is there any doubt Mother Teresa loved? Loved radically? Loved, seemingly, impossibly? Do I want to love like her? Do I want to imitate Jesus? This is how to begin to grow in love.

CLOSING PRAYER

Father, help me. Help me see. Help me love like you love me. Completely. Mother Teresa, pray for me!

DAY 18

Living perfection with Christ

Discretion directs.

It is certain that in perfect union, the soul has a very great facility in doing what is right, and that, by reason of a supernatural light and strength, she habitually practices the virtues to a heroic degree. This form of union with God corresponds to the perfect age of Christ, and to the fullness of His years as far as it is possible to attain such perfection here on earth; the soul is then in a state to yield supernaturally what in the fullness of his strength, life and fruitfulness, might be expected from man here below. When she has arrived at this point, there is established in the soul a just discernment of what is most perfect; it is what our Fathers called discretion, the mother of all virtues. Then, and then only, the soul knows both what is most perfect in itself, and what is most perfect for her; in this consists true discernment. Then she can offer herself to God in the way that the Church in her legends relates of St. Teresa and of several other saints: She made that most difficult of vows—to do always what she understood to be the most perfect. Such a vow cannot be prudently made except in a state in which it can be accomplished with a kind of facility, and on condition that it rests on a well-tried basis, for which mere good will cannot be a substitute; for neither a spiritual edifice nor a material one is built by beginning at the top.

—Mother Cécile Bruyère

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Does the Lord draw me to seek perfection in him?

CLOSING PRAYER

My Lord and my God, draw me deeper into your Heart so that all of my desires are only for your perfect love, lived in and with and through you.

DAY 19

An offering of prayer

Perhaps Tertullian’s most famous words are the blood of the martyrs are the seed of the Church. We all wonder if we could ever be such witnesses. That ability and desire begins in spending time with the Lord in prayer.

Prayer is the offering in spirit that has done away with the sacrifices of old. What good do I receive from the multiplicity of your sacrifices? asks God. I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams, and I do not want the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls and goats. Who has asked for these from your hands?

What God has asked for we learn from the Gospel. The hour will come, he says, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. God is a spirit, and so he looks for worshipers who are like himself.

We are true worshipers and true priests. We pray in spirit, and so offer in spirit the sacrifice of prayer. Prayer is an offering that belongs to God and is acceptable to him: it is the offering he has asked for, the offering he planned as his own.

We must dedicate this offering with our whole heart, we must fatten it on faith, tend it by truth, keep it unblemished through innocence and clean through chastity, and crown it with love. We must escort it to the altar of God in a procession of good works to the sound of psalms and hymns. Then it will gain for us all that we ask of God.

Since God asks for prayer offered in spirit and in truth, how can he deny anything to this kind of prayer? How great is the evidence of its power, as we read and hear and believe.

—Tertullian, Treatise on Prayer

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I look at prayer this way? Even remotely? What is it that might be holding me back?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, I want my life to be a prayer. Draw me in, draw me close, bring me into union with you for your use, completely.

DAY 20

Penetrating above the heavens

Be generous with God and he will be more generous than you could ever imagine.

Likewise, if our mind has not been burdened by the worldly vices and concerns that assail it, it will be lightened by the natural goodness of its purity and be lifted up to the heights by the subtlest breath of spiritual meditation. Leaving behind low and earthly places, it will be carried away to heavenly and invisible ones.

Therefore, if we wish our prayers to penetrate not only the heavens but even what is above the heavens, we should make an effort to draw our mind, purged of every earthly vice and cleansed of all the dregs of the passions, back to its natural lightness, so that thus its prayer might ascend to God, unburdened by the weight of any vice.

—Saint John Cassian

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Do I feel a heaviness of heart? Have I experienced God lifting it, lightening the heart for love with prayer and the sacraments?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I am a sinner who worries, who gets distracted, who falls. I come to you in sorrow for my sins and for taking my focus off you. I don’t want to languish. Set me free for your service.

DAY 21

O my Jesus!

Teach someone to say the name of Jesus, breathing him into her heart, a priest who had worked with the most hardened criminals and the most betrayed children explained to me, and a life will be changed. St. Gertrude the Great explored him to the depths and knew him as the everything he is for us.

I come, O most loving Jesus, I come unto you whom I have loved, whom I have desired. Drawn by your kindness, your compassion, and your charity, I follow because you have called me.… Let me have all things in you, whom I am eager to love above all things, and let me keep the vows of which I have made profession.… O you who search hearts, let me seek to be pleasing to you rather in heart than in body.… Come, O Jesus, my brother, my bridegroom, you great king who are God, you who are the lamb! Put such a mark upon the face of my soul that I may choose nothing under the sun, desire nothing, love nothing other than yourself. And do you yourself, who are dearest of all things dear, deign so to take me unto yourself in the bonds of mystical marriage, that I may be made your true bride and your true betrothed, by an indissoluble love stronger than death.

—Saint Gertrude the Great, Spiritual Exercises

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER…

Can I go before Jesus with every desire of my heart like this?

CLOSING PRAYER

Oh my Jesus, let me be utterly vulnerable with you.

DAY 22

Sweetest guest of my soul

There’s so much more the Lord wants us