M. Raymond > Quotes

“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!

“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.”
― M. Raymond, God, A Woman, And The Way: Mediator And Mediatrix

“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.”
― M. Raymond, Now!

“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

“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.”
― M. Raymond, Now!

“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.”
― M. Raymond, Now!

“That is the purpose of this book - to make you happy. Its plan is to have you base that happiness on God's own truth as given us in the Gospels. Any other base would be unworthy of God and too weak for you. For yours is a tumultuous and a tottering world; made so by men who love the darkness rather than the light. Stability is to be found only in the unmoved Mover of this restless universe and in His Christ who is "the same, yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8).

Fear stalks your land. Crippling anxieties and neurotic unrests swarm about you. But that is only because the highly publicized gospels of Expediency and Efficiency have had too many followers who have been altogether too faithful, while the only true Gospel, and the only Gospel of Truth, has been too hesitantly trusted and too listlessly tried.”
― M. Raymond, Your Hour

“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!”
― M. Raymond, God, A Woman, And The Way: Mediator And Mediatrix

“But I do, Matt. I'm often worried about my ability to take it. Will I be able to measure up when real pain comes?"

Father Matt snuffed out the cigarette he had bee smoking and casually said: "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."

"Meaning?" questioned Father Lehmann.

"Meaning that we are not supposed to borrow trouble. You've answered your own question, Jim, before you asked it."

"How so?"

"By the past six and a half years. You've taken it as it came along, Jim. You'll do the same in the future - if you have the future."

"What do you mean: if I have a future?"

"Jim, God gives us one moment at a time - only one. Not days; not hours; just moments. And He gives us grace for the moment at the moment; not the grace for the next moment. He gave you the grace you needed for yesterday, yesterday; what you need for today, today; and if you are to have a tomorrow, God will be faithful." (chapter 6)”
― M. Raymond, Your Hour

“When a lull came in the conversation he sat up in bed with vigor and said: "Does not all this explain that mysterious passage in the Gospel which tells how Mary placed her 'firstborn' in the manger? So many have mistakenly believed that that word implies that she was to have other children. We know she was to have millions on millions but not according to the flesh; only in the spirit. Jesus was her only Son in one sense, but all men are her children in the other."

"Exactly," said the young scholar. "In one of his encyclicals, Pius X told how Mary, carrying Jesus in her womb, was carrying each of us spiritually; for in carrying the Head of the Mystical Body physically, she was carrying the whole Mystical Body spiritually." (Chapter 2)”
― M. Raymond, Your Hour

“If we think of Kay and those kids along merely natural, Charlie, we're beaten. But don't have to think along those lines! God is God. He's asking us to believe as we never believed before. And the fist thing we've got to believe with all our being is that He knows what He is doing. You don't want this cancer. Neither do I. But obviously God wants us both to have it. So why not rejoice? We're always saying: 'Thy Will be done.' Let's do it. As for Kay and the kids, let's realize something we may never have fully realized before. They are His kids much more than they are yours. He is their Father much more completely than you could ever be. You and Kay brought them to birth. But who gave them being? God, of course. We don't believe enough in Divine Providence, Chic. That's why we got panicky. Don't you see that since God is the Father of you kids, He is obligated to care for them? Yes, I said obligated!! We pray the Our Father often enough, but we live the Our Father all too seldom. You're going to learn your Faith as you never learned it before - and you're going to live it as you never lived it before. God will take care of those kids. He has plans for their futures more complete than anything you could dream. What's more, He can make His plans come true. We don't trust God enough, Chic - and I believe it hurts Him. Show yourself to Him as you love your kids to show themselves to you. Your immediate concern is not the kids - or even Kay. Your immediate concern is to ready yourself for the most glorious moment of your existence: the moment of your meeting God face to face!”
― M. Raymond, This is your tomorrow and today: Man's share in the Resurrection

“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?”
― M. Raymond, The Silent Spire Speaks

“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.”
― M. Raymond, The Silent Spire Speaks

“This morning, I, and every priest who offered the Holy Sacrifice, took an almost weightless wafer of wheat, a drop of water, and a very insignificant amount of wine - three very ordinary, and truly insignificant things, no matter how we view them - and we offer them to God. Certainly in a world such as ours, these three things, plus the few words my fellow priests and I spoke, amount to nothing. Yet, when touched by God, when taken by Christ, when transubstantiated, what in the wide world can compare with them? Of the three things offered, neither you nor I, by ordinary vision, could see anything of the water; and of the wheat and the wine, the appearances remained just as insignificant after Consecration as before. But how deceiving are those appearances! The dynamism and power said to be latent in certain atoms is as nothing compared to the Power in what looks like a tiny wafer of wheat and a half ounce of wine. Omnipotence is there. And so with our insignificant lives and the truly insignificant acts that fill them. Once they are placed in Christ Jesus, touched by God, taken into His Christ, they can save the world.”
― M. Raymond, God, A Woman, And The Way: Mediator And Mediatrix

“That is the purpose of this book - to make you happy. Its plan is to have you base that happiness on God's own truth as given us in the Gospels. Any other base would be unworthy of God and too weak for you. For yours is a tumultuous and a tottering world; made so by men, who love the darkness rather than the light. Stability is to be found only in the unmoved Mover of this restless universe and in His Christ who is "the same, yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8).

Fear stalks your land. Crippling anxieties and neurotic unrests warm round about you. But that is only because the highly publicized gospels of Expediency and Efficiency have had too many followers who have been altogether too faithful, while the only true Gospel, and the only Gospel of Truth, has been too hesitantly trusted and too listlessly tried.”
― M. Raymond, Your Hour

“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

“. . . 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

“As the days mounted he grew convinced that Kitty's basic difficulty was her lack of a full and proper concept of God. It was nothing new in his experience, and it was this that made it all the sadder for him to see. Many people fail to recognize God's sovereign rights over them; fail dismally to see themselves as creatures - with all the raptures that word connotes. Failing to recognize God as Creator; they can never come to a full realization of their own very nature; for they have already missed the discovery of the origin and the end of their being. Consequently, no matter how active they may be, nor how orderly in their activities, they are like a mariner on an horizonless sea minus a compass. They go on and on; but they really have no ultimate destination.

He had discussed with his fellow priests, telling how he had found souls more naked to his sight in sickness than even in the sacrament of penance. He claimed that, for many, God was too "distant"; for others, merely "hypothetical" and even "purely imaginary". He saw how these good and earnest people had conceived the notion that their true greatness lay in serving their fellowman, in loving them, helping them, and even forgetting themselves in the process. This was putting man in the place of God; substituting social service for the service of God. "It is extremely attractive to many noble souls," he said, "truly seductive." Then he would add with a sad shake of his head, "But it is truly destructive, also. What is more, these people not only run the danger of losing eternal life, they are missing out in true temporal living; for there is no real living that is not worship of God. And these people are not worshipping Him." He admitted that such people found some satisfaction in their dedication, but insisted it was not full satisfaction, nor could it ever be; for it was a distortion of the way God wants us to serve our fellowman. "They are serving man as man, and not as images of God and members of Christ," was his conclusion.”
― M. Raymond, Your Hour

“I would mince no words in the letter to Charlie. He would read the truth of what had been found in him, and what it meant. But he would read some other and much more vital truths in this same letter. He would read of what God ham made of him by Baptism, and what this same God had a right to expect from him after this latest gift. I would insist upon the reality of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, and tell how special members are graced with the privilege of "filling up what is wanting to the Passion of Christ," as St. Paul has phrased it, and thus help God save mankind. Then I would urge my brother to look ahead. That would be my greatest objective. For experience had taught me how the clammy fogs of earth and human considerations are quickly dissipated by the white light of eternity which streams from the very throne of God - for those who have eyes to see it.”
― M. Raymond, This is your tomorrow and today: Man's share in the Resurrection

“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.”
― M. Raymond

“Faith alone allows us to see the power and the wisdom of God in a Man fastened to a tree. But if you will cultivate that faith, if you will go on looking with love, you will one day get deep insight into this mystery of God which is a mystery of merciful justice, of almighty and eternal love. You will also come to share in the life of this mystery. Then you will live, for then you will really love. Study this crucifix, Kitty. It is the book of all books. It will give you more than knowledge. It will give you real wisdom.”
― M. Raymond, Your Hour

“And each Catholic father and mother who give their all to their children, laboring day in and day out to shelter these breaths of God from contamination by the world, focusing all their attention on the formation of their minds and hearts to that in afterlife purity will be prized before any pleasure, honesty above all gain, and sinlessness beyond all station in society; every engaged Catholic young man and woman who spend the time of courtship in deepening the realization of the sublimity and the sanctity of the state they plan to enter; the Catholic men and women who have given themselves to a profession or a career and accent the fact that they are Catholics first and professional or career people afterwards, are speaking to the world with the same eloquence as those behind cloister, grate, curtain, and grille. This is a startling simplicity to our Catholic way of life. There is a power to our Catholic example which is irresistible. But we forget. We forget that the world watches. We forget that it hears our testimony though we speak not a word. We forget that we are witnesses at every moment and that the testimony we give will either convert man or condemn Christ!”
― M. Raymond, God, A Woman, And The Way: Mediator And Mediatrix