understand that He clearly demanded the same of me. I felt the gaze of God in my soul. This filled me with unspeakable love, but I understood that the Lord was looking with love on my virtues and my heroic efforts, and I knew that this was what was drawing God into my heart. It is from this that I have come to understand that it is not enough for me to strive only for the ordinary virtues, but that I must try to exercise (174) the heroic virtues. Although exteriorly a thing may be quite ordinary, it is the different manner [in which it is carried out] that only the eye of God catches. O my Jesus, what I have written is just a pale shadow of what I understand in my soul; these are purely spiritual things, but in order to write something of what the Lord gives me to know, I must use words with which I am totally dissatisfied, because they do not express the reality.
