What does this passage say you should defend with your life, and which of your daily acts contradicts that defence?

Theme: core_values · card 1/4 · 2026-05-07

If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit.” Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practice of poverty in more detail. “The first point is that which Saint Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when he says, ‘Let no one use anything as if it were his private possession.’ ‘A religious person,’ he says, ‘ought in respect to all the things that he uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it again.

— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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What did you notice about purpose today?

Theme: purpose · card 2/4 · 2026-05-07

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Which trait condemned in this passage do you also carry? Where does it show up?

Theme: shadow · card 3/4 · 2026-05-07

God’s touches, the wounds of his spear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the phraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon away in these highest states of ecstasy. “If our understanding comprehends,” says Saint Teresa, “it is in a mode which remains unknown to it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends.

— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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What single decision does this passage make harder to keep avoiding?

Theme: direction · card 4/4 · 2026-05-07

Amongst the functions of the soul, there are some of a lower and meaner form; he who does not see her in those inferior offices as well as in those of nobler note, never fully discovers her; and, peradventure, she is best shown where she moves her simpler pace. The winds of passions take most hold of her in her highest flights; and the rather by reason that she wholly applies herself to, and exercises her whole virtue upon, every particular subject, and never handles more than one thing at a time, and that not according to it, but according to herself.

— Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne (Complete)

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