Called to holiness
O soul, living image of God, redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, God’s will for you is that in this life you become holy as he is holy and in the life to come that you become glorious as he is.
Acquring the holiness of God is your assured vocation and it is to this that all your thoughts, words and deeds, your sufferings and all the movements of your life should tend. Otherwise you resist God by not doing that for which he has created you and now keeps you in being.
Oh! what a wonderful work: dust changed to light, filth to purity, sin to sanctity, the creature into the Creator and man into God! Oh what wonderful work! I say it again, yet it is a work that is difficult in itself and impossible to nature alone. There is only God who, by a grace, and an overflowing and extraordinary grace, is able to bring it to its end. And the creation of the whole universe is not so great a masterpiece as this one…
O soul, what will you do? What means will you choose to rise up to the God who is calling you? The ways to holiness are known to all, are set out in the Gospel, are explained by masters of the spiritual life, practiced by the saints and necessary to all those who wish to be saved and come to perfection. Such are: humility of heart, continual prayer, mortification in everything, abandonment to divine Providence, conformity to the will of God.