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1 " But there is no such being as an ordinary man or woman if by ordinary you mean what so many people mean: negligible. Each human being is so tremendous that he or she merits a reverence that is really religious. For each is a creation of God; each a mirror of Divinity; each a feature or a facet on the Face of Christ; each an object of constant care and concern to the Trinity. There is nothing ordinary in the sense that so many of us use that word, about any human being. "
― M. Raymond
2 " . . . the most perfect apologia I ever heard for the cloistered contemplative life. It is contained in two brief sentences. They come from the life of my late Abbott, Dom Mary Frederic Dunne. He would as any antagonist of the contemplative life two short questions. They admitted of only one very brief answer. He would look kindly at the objectioner and ask softly: "You believe in the efficiency of prayer, don't you?" When the person made the only possible reply - an affirmative one - Dom Frederic would smile and even more quietly ask: "Then what is wrong with a whole life of prayer? "
― M. Raymond , The Silent Spire Speaks
3 " We receive God's Will only in fragments; tiny fragments; one to each new now. It is our business to take them and piece them together, to fashion them into the design that is His and has been His from all eternity. What that design is we shall see only at our last moment. It will be perfect as God wills it to be perfect only if we live His Will in the now, the only fragment that is ours, the only fragment of God's plan that is allowed in our hands, the only fragment of Christ's life in us and our life in Christ that can be lived. But it is only by "gathering up these fragments, lest they be lost" that we can really live and attain life's only success - sainthood. "
― M. Raymond , Now!
4 " It takes courage to be a Christian. It takes great courage to go out and meet Christ when He is on the road to Calvary. But just as a coward has no right to call himself a man, so a slacker in any slightest degree has no right to call himself a Christian. We cannot say that we are "of Christ", far less that we are "in Christ", if we flinch the fullness of crucifixion! "
― M. Raymond , God, a Woman, and the Way: Mediator and Mediatrix
5 " It is no wonder that Mary loves our day and age. Thanks to persecution, we are giving more to her Son than any other age or day since Calvary. The Nazis in Germany, Austria, and Poland; The Reds in all the Balkan lands, Russia, and now in China, have done more for heaven than ever did the Roman Caesars, the kings and queens of England, or the madmen of the French Revolution. They have done more for the earth, too. For while peopling heaven with martyrs, they have also spread far and wide the grace of Christ Jesus, thanks to the oneness of His mystical body. "
6 " Why is it that our many mental institutions are overcrowded? People will not take their time. They do not live in the present! For are not all fears, phobias, crippling anxieties tied in with the future - a time that has not yet come - and may not? And are not deep depressions, melancholias, and foolish guilt complexes connected with the past - a time that is gone, and is gone forever - a time that cannot be changed even by God Almighty? These dementias most certainly bespeak some relation to the fact that those plagued with them have not been objective enough to stay in contact with the one great gratuitous reality called now. "
7 " Staring thus closely at time we suddenly realize that what many look upon as a bromide is really a bombshell; namely, the fact that "there is no time like the present." Indeed, no! For it is the only time God grants to any of us. He does not give us years, months, days, or even hours. He grants us nothing but the truly, indivisible, yet immense and immeasurable, Now. This is "your time" - part of "your hour. "
8 " As for sanctity - why are the highways and byways of our world littered with unfinished saints; why is it that so few Christians actually radiate Christ; why is it that two thousand years after grace enough has been merited to sanctify ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, so few humans achieve that full human maturity which is called sainthood? There is one very telling answer: we do not take our time! We either live too much in a future which has not yet come - and may not; or dwell in a past which can never return; neglecting all the while "His hour" which is "our time" - the ever present now. "
9 " By way of parenthesis let me say that this hand on the tomb has a lovely lesson for all those unfortunate members of Christ who have fallen into mortal sin. In them, Jesus lies dead - as dead as he was on this Sabbath of twenty centuries ago. But on them, as on this tomb, the hand of Mary, the Refuge of Sinners, rests, awaiting and praying for the Resurrection of Christ within them! May those who are in such a state fell that hand as they read this book, and bring Christ to life within them by asking Mary to help them make a perfect act of contrition, which is an act of love, this moment. She can grant such a grace; for she is Mediatrix of all grace! "
10 " Man is only man when he thinks, He thinks when he thinks clearly, consistently, cogently, conclusively. In one word, man in man only when he's logical. The simplest logic will take any thinking man from that grass to the Creator of all grasses - God. If you had your full courses in Scholastic Philosophy, I'd make you start with that single blade you've been chewing on and have you course through Minor and Major Logic into Cosmology, Psychology, Ontology, Ethics, and Natural Theology. That would be reviewing your Philosophy. That would be thinking like a man. That would be philosophizing in the truest sense of the word; for it would be going to the ultimate causes in order to know that grass really is. "
11 " I reached that point in my musings when it suddenly struck me that the present-day Communists were worse than Nietzsche. He claimed God was dead - intimating, at least, that He had lived; but to the Reds, He is not only now non-existent, but never had existence. That is a worse blasphemy. From it everything else in their regime follows quite logically: without God, no real authority; without real authority, no law and order; without law and order, no genuine freedom; without genuine freedom, no true human life or being. To such people, nothing is sacred; hence, nothing is truly human - for man is a sacred being. I shuddered as these truths seemed to grow out of one another. With God non-existent, the future life a myth, religion only a hoax, where can there be moral law? With no moral law why not lie, murder, rap, starve people, torture? Why not deceive? "
12 " Indeed God has spoken. And He has spoken to you and me. But when He says "Christmas", He means Christ and His Mass. When He says "Merry", He not only wishes us to meet His Christ, but wills that we become His members; He not only wishes that we learn about Christ's Mass, but wills that we live it. Unless we have heard all that, we have never heard God's greeting. Unless we do ll that we have never returned it; for we have missed the Gospel, rejected the Gift, and will never attain our goal. "
