By Sister Mary Scholastica, O.C.D.
There is a gem of a book called Into Your Hands, Father by Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen. This little book has carried me through some hard times in my own life. I found myself carrying it around and at needed moments, I’d pull out my trusty little copy, open to any random page and felt as if the good Lord was speaking directly to me.
So for today’s musings, some excerpts from Fr. Stinissen are being included for you. May it bless you as it has blessed me.
“We do not need to wait until we have gone through the whole valley to see retrospectively that there were truly springs in abundance there. We discover them on the journey itself. That is one of the miracles of surrender. If we do not dare walk hand in hand with God, whose hand shall we choose?”
“God knows exactly what we need. Everything He gives us is carefully measured to our needs. The one who willingly lets himself be led by God walks on a very straight path. He saves an infinite amount of time and trouble. Most Christians invest a great deal of their energy resisting God. As soon as we stop struggling, an unbelievable amount of energy is released. Resistance to life and its circumstances creates an inner cramp, which is the main and most significant reason for people’s unhappiness. Frustration comes when we do not get what we think we need, when what we expect does not happen….Those who trust that God is guiding everything can never be frustrated. If they do not get a certain thing, they know they do not need it. If something they have waited for does not happen, they conclude it was not meant for them. They are not disappointed, because everything is just as it should be, not in itself; far from it, but as the environment they are to live in, a ‘divine environment’”.
“A memory becomes healthy to the extent that it increasingly coincides with God’s memory. We begin to see with His eyes and remember His work. We see that we are ‘the work of His hands’. Our memory becomes healthy to the extent that we surrender our past to God and know that it is more His past than ours.”
“Total surrender should be our fundamental attitude. We may not take a vacation from this surrender. It is actually, in itself, a constant vacation. But prayer is nonetheless a privileged opportunity to practice this fundamental attitude. During our work we so easily become self-important; the self-willed ego slips in unnoticed and ruins everything. It takes a long time before we learn to preserve a selfless attitude in our work. We work with our body, of course, and it has its bad habits. The restlessness of our nerves affects and influences our heart, also. At prayer, on the other hand, our body is at rest, and it can even help in deepening our surrender.”
“The remarkable thing about gratitude is that it naturally and almost automatically grows and tends toward an ever greater unselfishness…I become more and more freed from myself and ever more fascinated by God’s love and beauty.”
“How can God work with us when we wake up each morning with a heavy burden that we carry around day after day? Yet it is not necessary to live in this way. All those difficult and heavy things can be transformed and transfigured from within, so that they become positive memories filled with light…We remember His love that met us in everything, even in the most difficult moments.”
“True freedom does not exclude the fact that one is led by another. The decisive question is: By whom or by what are we led? Are we led by blind impulses, or are we led from within, from a level that lies even deeper than what we usually call the unconscious”? ‘The soul’s center is God’, writes St. John of the Cross. No one is so truly himself, no one lives so authentically, genuinely, and freely, as the one who lets himself be led by God, who lives in the center of the soul. To live from one’s center is the greatest freedom.”
“A person is healthy to the extent that he can go out of himself…we are not created to live in the prisons of our small ego. We are created to go out, out of ourselves, and like the Spirit, to travel through the universe. Our existence is always an existence for others.”
“It is good to remember that your actions have a tendency to release a chain reaction, for good or for ill….If you say a whole-hearted Yes to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, it will be easier to say Yes to Him the next moment. If you say No to Him now, it will be more difficult to say Yes to Him tomorrow. That is why it is so urgent to come over the threshold and break through the barrier that has been built up by a bad habit…It is extremely liberating to know that God never demands more of us than we can give Him. The only important thing is that we never give up, that with a holy stubbornness we do what we can.”
“This is one of our greatest sins: that we do not recognize God, Who walks in our garden.”
