REVERENT, PURE, AND SMALL

A child's first conscious act is reverent admiration for all the child sees and absorbs.

The pure eyes of a child are filled with a constant awe which reaches out for new worlds.

A child's heart is a joyful heart, a heart filled with awe, a heart ever more unfolding in that very awe.

Awe, a reverent perception of creation, is the characteristic quality of a childlike person.

Whoever is interested in reconquering a higher degree of childlikeness, should acquire a higher degree of awe-inspired reverence and reverence-inspired awe.

The person who no longer has a sense of awe for creation, the person who has no reverence for all being, is not a child­like person.

Should I not have reverence for each truth and insight? Every truth is an original idea of God, an original wish of God; every created reality contains something of God's love. Reverent awe for the light of truth and love!

Piety is reverence for God and the divine in nature and culture.

Piety includes inner fervor and awesome fear.

Applied to God, reverence involves inner fervor because God is love. Reverence involves awesome fear because God is power, omnipotence.

Unless we have a correct image of the Father, the twofold element of true reverence cannot be alive in us, namely, inner fervor and awesome fear.

Nothing can remind a noble person more of the presence of God than the deep, pure eyes of a child.

Why is a child so graceful and charming? Because a child is sincere and pure. By this very purity and sincerity, we are spontaneously reminded of the beauty of paradise, the glory and happiness of paradise.

A truly pure person, whose nature reflects the glow of intactness, is very charming.

Childlike purity means that the drives and emotions are bound and controlled.

Of course, we know that it takes very little to awaken and arouse the drives and emotions. When looking at children, we may well become a little sad, for we wonder what will become of them. Their drives and emotions are still bound, but they lie in wait and can be aroused very quickly.

Instinctive purity is enlightened purity. A child's nature is interiorly alert and set against everything he feels is not fitting.

We are confronted with a tremendously high goal. In our education for purity we may not be satisfied that our will remains untouched by sin and faults. With the help of grace and at the cost of an earnest striving, the Holy Spirit has to support our striving and carry us upward until we have reconquered this instinctive purity.

Only when we are happy in seeing and loving God, that is, only in eternity, will we really possess instinctive purity in the full sense of the word. When we speak of instinctive purity, for which we strive here below, similar to the purity of a child, we are speaking in relative terms.

Why are childlike persons pure? Because they live in their world, in their wondrously holy and rich world. They love and play. They live constantly with God. Unless children can live in a rich world, the drives of their heart and mind, which should remain bound for a long time, will be quickly aroused. We may not overlook the fact that we cannot remain pure over a long period of time unless we are completely at home in a positive and great world.

We human beings need values; we need an idea to which we can surrender our hearts, or else we cannot remain pure.

If my interests center constantly on God and his interests, I have preserved the positive meaning of purity. Then my purity is enriching; otherwise it is tormented.

Purity greatly fosters knowledge of God and love of God. “Happy the pure in heart: They shall see God” (Mt 5:8).

Once I have made love-inspired purity my very own, I will radiate great peace. However, please listen well: love-inspired purity. When true love of God permeates my entire subconscious life, I will radiate great peace. And how many people in our day and age are in need of this calm peace! They need the example of simple, unaffected purity.

If I am intact in body and soul like a child, God will guide, lead, and direct me like the apple of his eye.

Parents love their child with an extraordinarily great love because of the child's lovable helplessness.

When someone confides in us in a childlike, helpless, humble, and trusting way, our compassion is aroused. Such trust awakens the riches of our love, and we long to give them away.

God's fatherliness is deeply awakened as soon as we show him how small we really are.

God loves me despite my smallness; in fact, he loves me because of my smallness and misery.

Childlike persons who admit their helplessness and smallness, who understand and admit their guilt, may be sure that God will flood the empty vessel of the soul with fatherly mercy.

Because we are small, because we feel small, helpless, and weak, we have a title - should I say we have a title in justice, in love - to God's immense mercy. If we understand this in all its depth, nothing can ever happen in our lives which will not bring us closer to God, to Eternal Love; nothing and least of all what happens most frequently: failure, weakness, misery, a total breakdown of our nature.

Why did God permit sin, original sin, the sin of Adam and Eve? Evidently he could have chosen a different order in which Adam and Eve would not have sinned. Why did he choose this order? Listen to the profound statement by St. Paul: “So that Jesus Christ might display all his patience” (1 Tim 1:16). What a beautiful, profound statement!

Humility, confidence, and self-surrender are elements of true childlikeness. Our smallness should trustingly urge us into the arms of the Father.

In the long run we can endure the experience of smallness only when we have, at the same time, an experience of belonging to a great “you.”

As compared with God's greatness, are we not small and helpless in the supernatural and in the natural order? What do we possess that we did not receive from God? Think of your physical powers, the powers of intellect, will and heart and the gifts of grace.

In the esteem of “little” saints, personal activity, personal efficiency and achievement, personal worth are insignificant. For “little” saints, God's activity and achievement are everything.

A healthy soul always feels small. The healthier my soul is, the more I love my smallness because my very smallness makes me see God's greatness all the more clearly and radiantly.

I should learn to rejoice in my smallness, in my limitations; I should rejoice that against the background of my limitations God rises before me in his greatness.

“I willingly boast of my weaknesses that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 2:9), the power of Christ which ultimately urges me into the arms of the merciful Father. The less seriously we take ourselves, the more important we are in the eyes of God. The more seriously we take ourselves, the less important we are in the eyes of God.

What do we mean when we say that we should not take our weaknesses so seriously? We mean that we should take God's mercies seriously. After all, it is God's will that we experience our weakness. Why? He wants us to become aware of him much more strongly and emphatically.

Nothing can free and calm our hearts more perfectly or make our personalities more transparent than plain honesty before ourselves and God. We shall pay dearly for any tendency to deceive even ourselves.

I would like to see myself in the mirror of God and Our Lady as clearly and truly as I am in the eyes of God.

Happy are those who, while growing deeply into God, experience their entire misery in the light of his love and glory.

Those who do not experience their limitations, have neither a desire nor an urge toward the infinity of God.

God gives the entire riches of his gifts and graces to those who are pliable, small, and humble.

Childlike, humble persons receive from God all they want. Both the saints and Holy Scripture tell us so. “Et exaltavit humiles” - He exalts the lowly... (Lk 1:52).