Quotes from John Beevers

But I am not going to give every detail. Some things lose their fragrance when opened to the air, and there are stirrings of the soul which cannot be put into words without destroying their delicacy.

But how good God is! How well He fits our trials to our strength!

God had already made me realise that His mercy does not grow weary of waiting for some souls and that He enlightens them only slowly. So I took good care not to anticipate Him.

There I found my sole comfort: Jesus, my only friend. I could talk only to Him. Talking to other people bored me, even when we spoke about religion. I felt it better to speak to God than about Him. There's often so much self-love involved in chatter about spiritual things!

For a long time I'd been fed on the wheat of The Imitation. It was the only book which did me any good, as I hadn't discovered the treasures of the Gospels. I knew every chapter by heart. I was never without this little book.

It still stops my having any feeling of pride when people think well of what I do, for I say to myself: Since any small good deed I do can be mistaken for a fault, the mistake of calling a fault a virtue can be made just as easily.

I am no longer surprised by anything and I feel no distress at seeing my complete helplessness. On the contrary, I glory in it and every day I expect to discover fresh flaws in myself. In fact, this revelation of my nothingness does me much more good than being enlightened on matters of faith.

Earth seemed a place of exile and I dreamt of heaven.

She flings herself into the most dreadful rages when things don't go as she wants them. She rolls on the ground as if she's given up hope of anything ever being right again. Sometimes she's so overcome that she chokes.

St. Thérèse could not, of course, have suffered all the attacks on the will that we endure. But she deliberately did her utmost to avoid all distraction, both before and after her entry into Carmel. ... And we, too, could seek to strengthen our will by avoiding every distraction that does not belong to our station in life, and with the will strong, even these distractions would cease to turn us more than momentarily from our path.