Quotes from Carlo Carretto

Love is the synthesis of contemplation and action, the meeting-point between heaven and earth, between God and humanity.

God does not hurry over things; time is his, not mine. And I, little creature, a man, have been called to be transformed into God by sharing his life. And what transforms me is the charity which he pours into my heart.

So true prayer demands that we be more passive than active; it requires more silence than words, more adoration than study, more concentration than rushing about, more faith than reason. We must understand thoroughly that true prayer is a gift from heaven to earth, the Father to his child; from the Bridegroom to the bride, from him who has to one who has not, from Everything to nothing.

Don't worry about what you ought to do. Worry about loving. Don't interrogate heaven repeatedly and uselessly saying, "What course of action should I pursue?" Concentrate on loving instead. And by loving you will find out what is for you. Loving, you will listen to the Voice. Loving, you will find peace.

Love is the fulfillment of the law and should be everyone's rule of life; in the end it's the solution to every problem, the motive for all good.

The darkness is necessary, the darkness of faith is necessary, for God's light is too great. It wounds. I understand more and more that faith is not a mysterious and cruel trick of a God who hides himself without telling me why, but a necessary veil. My discovery of him takes place gradually, respecting the growth of divine life in me.

and I repeat again St. Augustine's words: "Love and do as you will." Don't worry about what you ought to do. Worry about loving. Don't interrogate heaven repeatedly and uselessly saying, "What course of action should I pursue?" Concentrate on loving instead. And by loving you will find out what is for you. Loving, you will listen to the Voice. Loving, you will find peace.

Poverty is love for the poor Jesus, and voluntary self-denial. Jesus could have been rich. He did not have to live the kind of life he lived. No, he wanted to be poor in order to share the restrictions of real poverty, to put up with the lack of comfort, to suffer in his body the hard reality which weighs down the man searching for bread, to experience the abiding instability of one who possesses nothing.

Even the love of study can make people unbelievably selfish; the passion for research can make men as mad and blind as termites in their dark tunnel.

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.

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.

WHEN I FIRST CAME to the Sahara I was afraid of the night. For some, night means more work, for others dissipation, for still others insomnia, boredom. For me now it's quite different. Night is first of all rest, real rest. At sunset a great serenity sets in, as though nature were obeying a sudden sign from God.

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.

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.

And if, through this desire of ours to say something, or do something, you feel that you must open your mouth, then do this: choose one word or a little phrase which well expresses your love for him; and then go on repeating it in peace, without trying to form thoughts, motionless in love before God who is love.

The heart, with all its potential, loses its balance too easily when it loves a creature. It throws itself upon the creature loved and wants to possess it; and possessiveness kills. It holds on to the creature so passionately that it loses sight of the creator. Moreover it ruins the object of its love by its obsession with it. It ruins it, makes it a slave.

Only very late do we learn the price of the risk of believing, because only very late do we face up to the idea of death. This is what is difficult. Believing truly means dying. Dying to everything: to our reasoning, to our plans, to our past, to our childhood dreams, to our attachment to earth, and sometimes even to the sunlight, as at the moment of our physical death.

At the same time he puts him into a state of crisis and makes him weak, because it is so difficult to explain things to someone who is always right, who always wins, who is absolutely sure of himself.

Christ has freed us from the past with its infinite complexities. In Him we have become new creatures and begun a new life, owing nothing to anyone, writing in our book, Now I am beginning... What matter is your past, your sin? Now walk in the newness you have found and sin no more.

I have never found a better metaphor for my relationship with the Eternal: a point lost in infinite space, wrapped round by the night under the subdued light of the stars. I am this point lost in space: the darkness, like an irreplaceable friend, is faith. The stars, Gods witness.

We are the wire, God is the current. Our only power is to let the current pass through us.

When I love I can no longer do as I will. When I love I am love's prisoner; and love is tremendous in its demands.

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.

One hour a day, one day a month, eight days a year, for longer if necessary, you must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God. If you don't look for this solitude, if you don't love it, you won't achieve real contemplative prayer.