• And yet that mother is right. She has sacrificed herself for her family. The others have allowed themselves plenty of freedom. She has had no share of it. She has worked, slaved, given up every moment of her day. But there’s something more serious, something which is the real cause of suffering. She hasn’t been understood. They have taken her for granted; they haven’t, for example, noticed her crying in silence.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • At the bottom of the human heart there is an ulcer which grows with the years. It is the ulcer of resentment at being exploited by others. Nobody escapes it; it takes time for the soul to locate it and, if and when God wills, to root it out.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • In this deeply painful state, prayer becomes true and strong even though it may be as dry as dust. The soul speaks to its God out of its poverty and pain; still more out of its impotence and abjection. Words become even fewer and barer.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • Every means has proved powerless, every path too short. God’s impenetrable night wraps round us. Terrible loneliness accompanies us, but this is necessary and inevitable. Every word of consolation seems like a lie. One believes one has been abandoned by God.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • But God does not listen to such entreaty; rather, instead of consolation he sends boredom, and instead of light, darkness. Right there, halfway along our road, we don’t know whether we are going backwards or forwards.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • The more they advance, the more the darkness thickens around them. The more they go on, the more bitter and insipid everything becomes. They derive little comfort from the recollection of times past when God seemed to make their spiritual path easier.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • If we have demonstrated such greed at the table of the body, imagine how we would have behaved at the table of spiritual things, if we had felt ourselves attracted by it.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • If God were attainable with the intelligence, how unjust it would be! It would have made easy the task of the wise and the great of this world, and would have made knowledge of God all but impossible for the little ones, the poor, and the ignorant. But God himself has found the way to be equally accessible to everybody. His revelation comes in love, in that faculty which we can all share.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • I thought that in prayer everything depended on me and my efforts, on the books passing through my hands, and the beauty of the words which I was able to introduce into my conversations with God. What is worse, I thought the knowledge of God I was acquiring through study and reasoning was the real and only one. I hadn’t yet understood that it was only an image, a covering, an introduction to God’s true and authentic revelation, which is supernatural and eternal.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • I am speaking of the selfishness of good people, devout people, those who have succeeded through spiritual exercises and self-denial in being able to make the proud profession before the altar of the Most High, “Lord, I am not like the rest of men.” Yes, we have had the audacity at certain times of our lives to believe we are different from other men. And here is the deepest form of self-deception, dictated by self-centeredness at its worst: spiritual egotism. This most insidious form of egotism even uses piety and prayer for its own gain.

    ….

    There is no limit to such self-deception. And the path, once entered upon, is so slippery that God has to treat us harshly to bring us back to our senses. But there is no other way of opening our eyes. It has to be painful. But often it isn’t enough. Disaster, illness, disappointment hover like birds of prey over the poor carcass that had the temerity to say, “Lord, I am not like the rest of men.” How can we possibly entertain the idea that we are different from other men, when we shout, cry, feel afraid, lack determination, and behave atrociously just like everybody else?

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto