List of points

It is not that I lack true joy; on the contrary… And yet, painfully aware of my unworthiness, it is only natural that I should cry out with Saint Paul, “wretched man that I am!”

—It is at such a time that you should increase your desire to tear down once and for all the barriers you yourself have set up.

Your life is happy, very happy, though on occasions you feel a pang of sadness, and even experience almost constantly a real sense of weariness.

—Joy and affliction can go hand in hand like this, each in its own “man”: the former in the new man, the latter in the old.

The first step towards bringing others to the ways of Christ is for them to see you happy and serene, sure in your advance towards God.

If your prayers, your sacrifices and your actions do not show a constant concern for the apostolate, it is a sure sign that you are not happy, and that you have to be more faithful.

—Whoever possesses happiness, and the good, will always seek to give it to others.

I am every day more convinced that happiness in Heaven is for those who know how to be happy on earth.

With crystal clarity I see the formula, the secret of happiness, both earthly and eternal. It is not just a matter of accepting the Will of God but of embracing it, of identifying oneself with it — in a word, of loving the Divine Will with a positive act of our own will.

—This, I repeat, is the infallible secret of joy and peace.

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…

Help me repeat in the ear of this person and of that other one… and of everyone: a sinner who has faith, even if he were to obtain all the blessings of this earth, will necessarily be unhappy and wretched.

It is true that the motive that leads us (and should lead everyone) to hate sin, even venial sin, ought to be a supernatural one: that God abhors sin from the depths of his infiniteness, with a supreme, eternal and necessary hatred, as an evil opposed to the infinite good. But the first reason I mentioned to you can lead us to this other one.