Don't fear, God's love is here!

This might be the first of many quotations from St. Therese of Lisieux's "Story of A Soul": the quotation below was taken from xvi - xvii.

She called her doctrine "the little way of spiritual childhood," and it was based on complete and unshakable confidence in God's love for us. This confidence means that we cannot be afraid of God even though we sin, for we know that, being human, sin we shall but, provided that after each fall, we stumble to our feet again and continue our advance to God, He will instantly fogive us and come to meet us. St. Therese does not minimise the gravity of sin, but she insists that we must not be crushed by it. We must repent and realise that God's love never fails. And God's love for us must be matched, within our human limitations, by our love for Him. There must be a ceaseless flow of love - to and fro- between Creator and creature. Now this interchange of love does away with the feeling that to please God we must do great and extraordinary things. If we only fear God, we are in danger of deluding ourselves that He needs to be placated by deeds which, in some measure, match His awful majesty. Few saits have appreciated this majesty better than St. Therese, but she never is overawed by it. She accepts it and accepts, too, the fact of her own littleness by the side of it. She knows that nothing she can ever do can be adequate, but this leaves her quite untroubled. The depth of her love for God means that all the small, trivial acts of which she is capable take on great value because of the motive behind them. And God, with His overwhelming love and understanding, accepts them joyfully. So "the little way" means that salvation is made not easy, but obviously possible. Salvation has, of course, always been possible, but from time to time there have arisen within the Church movements such as Jansenism which belittled or denied God's mercy. The Church has invariably condemned such movements, but these heresies have left their mark and men have been plunged in despair, believing that they could never achieve salvation, that a life of unbelievable austerity and heroic deeds was essential, and that without such a life they were of no account before God. This is rank heresy. He whole teaching of the Church condems it. But vestiges of it still survived.

And of no relation to this awesome quote (John Beevers write better introductions than your average editor): the Shostakovitch Jazz Suites! Their not "jazz" but their cool.