That's it, in a nutshell. These past few weeks have been a flurry interviews, trying to stay out of jail, abetting my patient landlord, falling out of contact with some, falling into contact with others...
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability – And that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually – let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Defy the old Dragon,
defy the jaws of death,
defy fear as well!
Rage, oh world, and quake,
here I stay,
singing in perfect peace!
- Jesu, meine Freude, by Johann Sebastian Bach
The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes that you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money that you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.
- St. Basil