Let go of your plans. The first hour of your morning belongs to God. Tackle the day’s work that God charges you with, and it will be given you the power to accomplish it. And when night comes, and you look back over the day, and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarassed and ashamed — just take everything as it is, put it in God’s hands, and leave it with God.
When you seek Truth, you seek God — whether you know it or not. Do not accept anything as Love which lacks Truth. The world doesn’t need what women have, it needs what women are. The soul of woman must be expansive, and open to all human beings. It must be quiet, so that no small weak flame will be extinguished by stormy winds. Warm, so as not to benumb fragile buds. Empty of itself, in order that extraneous life may have room in it. Finally, mistress of itself, and also of its body, so that the entire person is readily at the disposal of every call. The woman’s soul is fashioned as a shelter in which other souls may unfold.
Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning. Woman’s soul is present, and lives more intensely, in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body. Whereas with men, the body has more pronouncedly the character of an instrument, which serves them in their work, and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.
Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation, no matter whether it is in marriage, in a religious order, or in a worldly profession. Everywhere the need exists for her maternal sympathy and help. We can do nothing ourselves, God must do it. To speak to the divine thus is easier by nature for woman than for man, because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone.
The motive, principle and end of the religious life, is to make an absolute gift of oneself to God, in a self-forgetting love — to end one’s own life, in order to make room for God’s life. On the question of relating to our fellow humans, a neighbor’s spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else we do is a means to an end, but love is an end already, since God is love.