523 part iv: meditations for weekly retreats 2. Consider what you have been more involved in and dedicated to as a religious: mortifications or the amenities of life? To what was your spirit inclined more: subduing your will or fulfilling it? Satisfying the desires of the others, especially your Superiors, or your own desires? If you stuck to your own desires, be convinced that a false spirit has led you. If, however, it was otherwise, doubt not that you were guided very well and understand that your vocation was found worthy. So that you may respond to it, you should increase and multiply the fresh, small sparks of divine love and practice of virtue, supporting them by a lively effort and a desire for advancement, and by actual progress. If you work hard at self-contempt, you will feel how sweet the Lord is. If you estrange yourself wholly from the world, you will experience how bitter the world is. For what flavor, what aroma of material things is perceived by those who do not merely taste, but imbibe carnal desires, worldly pleasures, and Babylonian drinks? For a short time, they shall draw from them and taste the sweetness because of which –alas –they shall be thrown in an immense abyss of eternal feelings of bitterness. They will, however, bewail forever that they indulged their nature, and they shall not wipe away the stain! On the contrary, how much everlasting sweetness can still be found in the cross, in endurance, in mortifications, in hardships, in misfortunes, and wrongs, born in imitation of the God-Man! The lovers of the cross and of torments find in these things an abundance of never-ending joys, perennial delights, holy and everlasting pleasures, although only after a hard fight and struggle with the world, with hell, and their evil lusts. To you the free option is given to choose either one of these two approaches to life, because you possess free judgment and free will. But check with what prudence and what profit you have already chosen and will choose again. You should consider the end of all, which is twofold for the twofold kinds of men. For the luxurious, those avid of honor, those leading at present a lawless life; the punishment is eternal death, according to that well-known maxim: “Their end is destruction” (cf. Phil 3:19). For
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