July 7
“The higher the virtues you share and exchange with others, the more perfect friendship will be… O God, how precious this friendship will be! It will be excellent if it comes from God, excellent because it leads to God, excellent because its bond will endure eternally in God. How good it is to love here on earth as they love in heaven and to learn to cherish one another in this world as we shall do eternally in the next!”
-St. Francis de Sales
July 6
“It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
-St. John Paul II
July 5
“It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.”
-St. John Paul II
July 4
“The greatest disease in the West today is not [tuberculosis] or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty—it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love as there is a hunger for God.”
-St. Teresa of Calcutta
July 3
“No, my children! We cannot lead a double life. We cannot have a split personality if we want to be Christians. There is only one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is that life which has to become, in both body and soul, holy and filled with God: we discover the invisible God in the most visible and material things.
July 2
“You must realize now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, secular, and civil activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home, and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it."
-St. Josemaria Escrivá
July 1
“The work that you are doing in the office is sacred work. Never do it slap dash . . . it is Jesus there. Your hands are feeding the hungry Christ, your hands are clothing the naked Christ, your hands are giving home to the homeless Christ in some part of the work. So, do your work well, and do it with great love. Otherwise it is not worth doing it. It is not worth doing it half-half. That is the means for you to become holy because Jesus our God is there.”
-St. Teresa of Calcutta
June 30
“It’s not how much we do but how much love we put in the action that matters to Almighty God and that is love for God—that God keeps on loving the world through each one of us, through the work that has been entrusted to you.”
-St. Teresa of Calcutta
June 29
“Prayer, true prayer, is a communication—and it occurs only when two people, two minds, are truly present to each other in some way. So in prayer we must do more than merely visualize God as present as some sort of father figure. His fictionalized presence will not do; his imaginative presence will not do.
June 28
"If we could constantly live in the realization that we are [children] of a heavenly Father, that we are always in his sight and play in his creation, then all our thoughts and every action would be a prayer. For we would be constantly turning to him, aware of him, questioning him, thanking him, asking for his help, or begging his pardon when we have fallen. And every true prayer begins precisely here: placing oneself in the presence of God.”
-Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, S.J.
