Quotes from Carlo Carretto

This is crucial: as long as we pray only when and how we want to, our life of prayer is bound to be unreal. It will run in fits and starts.

Every morning, after Mass and meditation, you will make your way to work in a store or shipyard. And when you get back in the evening, tired, like all poor men forced to earn their living, you will enter the little chapel of the brotherhood and remain for a long time in adoration; bringing to your prayer all that world of suffering, of darkness, and often of sin, in the midst of which you have lived for eight hours taking your share of pain and toil.

The discovery that I was nothing, that I was responsible for no one, that I was a man of no importance, gave me the joy of a boy on holiday

This lack of liberty, or rather this slavery to fashion, is one of the idols which attracts a great number of Christians. How much money is sacrificed upon its altar!—without taking into account that so much good could otherwise be done with it. Being poor in spirit means, above all, being unrestrained by what is called fashion; it means freedom.

These realities must be sanctified; we must not think that a person is holy just because he has made vows. One with this outlook thinks of the hour of spiritual reading or prayer as the only time for the spiritual life and ignores the longer time dedicated to work and everyday living. The result is at best an anemic and unreliable religious personality.

to be a kind of leaven there.

Why should I still work with enthusiasm when someone has been promoted who doesn't really deserve it? In fact, I no longer love; I am unable to. But this inability to love is quite crucial because it leaves me with an enormous feeling of indifference. Whether I like it or not, love is the aim of my life, the reason for my existence, the only thing that really satisfies me.

In fact, since I ceased to love I have known no peace. During my sleepless nights I feel sapped of energy, tormented by the wanderings of my spirit.

Thus, after so many years, I feel I have found the solution to the only real problem we have on earth. I have recognized my powerlessness and this was grace. In faith, hope and love I have contemplated the all-power-fulness of God and this, too, was grace. God can do everything and I can do nothing. But if I offer this nothing in prayer to God, everything becomes possible in me.

As long as I waste time defending myself I get nothing done and I am not truly Christian; I do not know the depths of the heart of Jesus. To forgive, really forgive, means convincing ourselves deep down that we merited the wrong done to us.

Prayer is the sum of our relationship with God. We are what we pray. The degree of our faith is the degree of our prayer.

With your work finished and the caravan halted, you stretch out on the sand with a blanket under your head and breathe in the gentle breeze which has replaced the dry, fiery daytime wind. Then you leave the camp and go down to the dunes for prayer. Time passes undisturbed. No obligations harass you, no noise disturbs you, no worry awaits you: time is all yours. So you satiate yourself with prayer and silence, while the stars light up in the sky.

There is no true religious formation which is not based on the Gospel.

I said earlier that prayer is like love. Words pour at first. Then we are more silent and can communicate in monosyllables. In difficulties a gesture is enough, a word, or nothing at all—love is enough.

I understood, for example, that finding one's way in the desert is much easier by night than by day, that the points of reference are numerous and certain. In the years which I spent in the open desert I never once got lost, thanks to the stars. Many times, when searching for a Tuareg camp or a lost weather station, I lost my way because the sun was too high in the sky. But I waited for night and found the road again, guided by the stars.

When my faith was weak, all this would have seemed incomprehensible to me. I was afraid as a child is of the night. But now I have conquered it, and it is mine. I experience joy in night, navigating upon it as upon the sea. The night is no longer my enemy, nor does it make me afraid. On the contrary, its darkness and divine transcendence are a source of delight.

Sometimes I even close my eyes to see more darkness. I know the stars are there in their place, as a witness to me of heaven. And I can see why darkness is so necessary The darkness is necessary, the darkness of faith is necessary, for God's light is too great. It wounds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just as you were beside Jesus, you are still beside us to accompany us to eternal life, to teach us to be small and poor in our work, humble and hidden in life, courageous in trial, faithful in prayer, ardent in love.

Don't try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach him in love; that is possible.