Relationship between God and man

  Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 15

The human heart’s natural delight, natural trust in God is due solely to the relationship between soul and God. A close bond it is, but a hidden one; known to all, yet understood by few; undeniable, but unfathomable.

(Read further in Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 15)

Our natural tendency to love God

  Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 16

If human beings possessed the original perfection and original justice that Adam knew, when God first made him – they would not only have a tendency to love God more than anything; they would be able to achieve it naturally without any other help from God than the ability he gives each creature to perform actions befitting its nature.

(Read further in Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 16)

Our ability to love God is natural

  Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 17

To our nature, after all, is sickly with the distressing weakness of sin.  It is like palm trees on the side of the world; they only sprout incompletely, trying, so to speak, to produce fruit, but not quite succeeding.  The maturing of ripe dates is reserved to hotter climates.  Left to itself, the human heart never gets beyond the rudiments, as it were, of loving God.  For love to reach maturity, when we love God more than anything else – that demands the life of grace, the habit of charity.

(Read further in Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 17)

Our natural tendency to love God is not worthless

  Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 18

Although this natural tendency of ours in incapable, in itself, of bringing us to the happy state of loving God as he deserved to be loved, if only we were faithful to its promptings, God’s loving care would come to our aid, would lead us on.

(Read further in Treatise on the Love of God, Book 1, Chapter 18)

  "I am as human as anyone could possibly be"

(Letters of Spiritual Direction, Theme I)

Any spirituality rests upon, or better yet, includes a set of assumptions about God and humankind and about how they are related to each other.

(Read further in Letters of Spiritual Direction, Theme I)

  "Let us belong to God...  in the midst of so much busyness"

(Letters of Spiritual Direction, Theme III)

Salesian spirituality, while retaining much of the interior spirit of the desert, in the sense that a radical call from God does indeed claim and refashion the human heart, did not at all assert that that voice could only echo clearly in the stillness of the hermit’s cave or the monastery cloister.

(Read further in Letters of Spiritual Direction, Theme III)

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