Pages from the Past: Blessed "discontent"

Selections from a book by Fr Giuseppe Forlai, IGS (probably Christ Lives in Me, the book on Pauline Spirituality pictured below). I did the translation here for myself. Fr Forlai is a member of the Institute of Jesus the Priest, a Pauline secular institute for diocesan clergy.

“Our condition becomes a blessing if we discover that nothing created can satisfy us through and through for the simple reason that the ‘interiority’ of each one is so rich and so great that it cannot be bound/limited within things, individuals, roles. Don Alberione writes: ‘My end cannot be pleasure or esteem or wealth or virtue or power or knowledge. All of those, all that is not infinite, while my heart has infinite aspirations.’ The spiritual person is therefore the one who lives this holy discontent with serenity.” 

“Truly, ‘holy’ [discontent] because it frees us from false expectations or from the slavery of saying to [anyone? anything?] ‘I cannot live without you.’ We are infinite in desiring because we bear the hereditary trait of divine infinity. Just as God cannot dwell in a house made by human hands, so man cannot live in a ‘house’ he himself built.”

St Paul put it more succinctly.

“That’s not all. A solid spiritual life must be able to dialogue between the basic sense of God and this interiority; in other words, the ‘amazement at reality’ must enter into a covenant with the ‘holy discontent.’ In isolation, the two experiences have no meaning; to recognize that there is a Living One [and not know] how to desire the infinite good only brings madness; vice-versa, to know that one is structurally incomplete and discontented and not be amazed at the gratuitousness of being keeps one simply frustrated. To bring these two ‘infinities’ (God and the interior self) together is a preliminary condition for faith and for a journey of ‘sequela’ that does not remain mere experimentalism or irrational fideism.”

"Pages from the Past" are randomish excerpts from my old journals. I process things in writing, so there were a lot of volumes, but here and there I found notes that were still pertinent or helpful. I got rid of the books (hello, shredder!) and typed up the things I wanted to save, whether for myself (mostly) or to share.