The books the Holy Spirit is writing are living, and every soul a volume in which the divine author makes a true revelation of his word, explaining it to every heart, unfolding it in every moment.
Interpretation
This quote conveys the idea that each person's life is a unique expression of divine communication and revelation.
Jean-Pierre De Caussade suggests that the teachings and experiences of life, as influenced by the Holy Spirit, are like living books that reveal divine truths to each individual. Each soul contributes to this ongoing narrative, where personal experiences and moments illuminate understanding and connection with the divine.
In practice
In a sermon about personal growth, one might say, 'As Jean-Pierre De Caussade reminds us, our lives are like books that the Holy Spirit is writing, revealing truth through our experiences.'
There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.
If the work of our sanctification presents us with difficulties that appear insurmountable, it is because we do not look at it in the right way. In reality, holiness consists in one thing alone, namely, fidelity to God's plan. And this fidelity is equally within everyone's capacity in both its active and passive exercise.
There is no peace more wonderful than the peace we enjoy when faith shows us God in all created things.
Souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous and the most mortifying things that happen to them in their lives, honor everything equally with delight and rejoicing, and welcome with open arms what others dread and avoid.
You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God's] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is.
God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions.
I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me.
They don't understand what it is to be awake, / To be living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
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