A Few Years on a Modest Wall

She lived in an era when Face Book was not even a distant possibility. Yet what she wrote on the modest wall of her life has become more than a community page on the FB. Loving God was her greatest charism. "To put the Lord's mercies on record" was a happy mission for her. She never had the time to read  the romantic  fiction of her days,but she read stories about the deeds of the great French heroines—especially of St. Joan of Arc,. Even before she was fourteen, she knew each chapter of the 'Imitation of Christ' by heart!
For a long time she had nourished her spiritual life with the “fine flour” contained in the Imitation of Christ for she had not yet found the treasures hidden in the Holy Gospels.
She writes,

"Seeing my great thirst for knowledge, God was pleased, when I was fourteen, to add to the “fine flour,” “honey” and “oil” in abundance.This “honey” and “oil” I found in the conferences of Father Arminjon on The End of this World and the Mysteries of the World to Come. While reading this book my soul was flooded with a happiness quite supernatural. I experienced a foretaste of what God has prepared for those who love Him;" This book inspired her so much that it  plunged into her heart "all the great truths of religion" and a "happiness not of this earth"!

Then when she was seventeen or eighteen, her favourite author was St. John of the Cross. It was all the spiritual food she needed at that time. She quotes with ease from the "Canticle of the Soul". After that she found all spiritual books as dry because by then she had found the Hidden Manna in the Scriptures. "There you have whole meal nourishment" says she.
Looking up at the moon from the room with a view upstairs, she writes, " those silvery rays the moon cast on a sleeping world, the stars, the fleecy clouds floating by in the evening - how everything conspired to turn our thoughts towards Heaven."
  That young girl called herself the " the little flower of our Lady". " The Blessed Virgin too kept good watch over the little flower that was dedicated to her. She did not want to see it tarnished with stains of the earth, so she took care to plant it high up, in her own mountain air, before it opened".
What a darling Saint we have in Therese , whose feast we  celebrate on October 1.She also had a special devotion to Holy Angels, especially the Angel sent by God to guard her (the young girls of these days with pixies and vampires as pals, please note this, and BEWARE !). October 2 is  the feast day of Guardian Angels.
Maranatha..., Come Lord Jesus.

Digging wells and cisterns

"My people have committed two sins:
       They have forsaken me,
       the spring of living water,
       and have dug their own cisterns,
       broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
So goes Jehovah's complaint about the faithless Israelites.(Jeremiah 2 :13) Now what are cisterns? They are man made reservoirs, hewed and chipped out of rocks, for storing water. These can very well get polluted by dirt or insects, or if broken, water can just seep out of it, leaving it empty. Both can be disastrous. But wellsprings are different. here the water comes from a source of its own, from the depths of the earth. it is unpolluted fresh water.
I've been trying to read the Book of Wisdom  last week, trying to pump out the freshness of the Living Word from the Bible. Suddenly there fell before me a fantasy novel, a creative imitation of J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer. I was forced to read it due to an unforeseen circumstance. But then I realized the difference between a well and a broken cistern.I felt like Dante  in the second circle of Inferno.There, he meets Francesca da Rimini  who tells him  her woeful story of how she happened to reach hell.It was all due to a weak moment of temptation to which she yielded, and before long lo..., she and her brother in law Paolo were murdered by her husband Giovanni even before they could repent!A terrible domestic tragedy indeed!.See how she narrates the whole incident to Dante , who was moved to tears of sorrow and pity seeing her afflictions!
       One day, to pass the time away, we read
      Of Lancelot - how love had overcome him.
      We were alone , and we suspected nothing.
       And time and again that reading led
       Our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,
        And yet one point alone defeated us.
         When we had read how the desired smile
         Was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
         this one , who never shall be parted from me,
         While all his body trembled , kissed my mouth.
A Gallehault indeed, that book and he
who wrote it, too; that day we read no more."
While she narrated thus to Dante, her lover Paolo Malatesta, her companion in sin wept beside her in that second circle of inferno where Lucifer buffeted forever the carnal sinners with violent storms.And Dante fainted !
In the Old Testament times, there are mentions of how the Israelites dug wells and how Philistines came and plugged them with silt or mud. But then they kept on digging again and again, because water was and still is essential for life.Water, the elixir of life. Ha!
Maranatha, Come Lord jesus