TIPS FOR A BUSY LIFE

You need some moments of recollection every day.  The best is in the morning so that it can influence your day. Defend this moment like a besieged city. Fight all intruders, clear out the trenches. In fact, the afternoon is too long without another moment of recollection.

Recollection is the only cure for your haughtiness, the sharpness of your criticism, the forays of your imagination, your impatience with inferiors, your love of pleasure and all your other faults.

Recollection is an excellent remedy but it needs repetition like a good watch that needs constant rewinding.

Reread books that moved you; it will move you more the second time around. Be patient with yourself, avoid self-deception and discouragement. Expect nothing of yourself but all things of God. Knowledge of our own hopeless, incorrigible weakness, with unreserved confidence in God's power, is the true foundation of all spiritual life.

If you do not really have much time for recollection, make good use of whatever you have. It does not need long hours to love God. Love of God is the true Kingdom of God within us, which nothing can disturb. . .and you enter it through recollection.

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RECOLLECTION

During the course of the day, recollect as often as you can that you stand in the presence of God. Consider what he does and what you are doing. You will find his eyes turned towards you and perpetually fixed on you with an incomparable love, says St. Francis de Sales.

We need no wings to go in search of Him, but have only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us, muses St. Teresa of Avila.

(02-11-03)