Advice from St Jerome

Pray without Ceasing

The Apostle bids us pray without ceasing and to saints their very slumber is a prayer. Yet we should have fixed hours for praying, so that if we happen to be engaged in some business, the time itself will remind us of our duty.

Everyone knows that the third, sixth, and ninth hours, dawn, too, and evening, are the right times. And no food should be taken until after a prayer, nor should we leave the table without rendering thanks to the Creator.

Twice or three times in the night we should rise from the bed and say over passages of Scripture which we know by heart.

Judge not...

Speak evil of no one and slander not your mother's son. "Who art thou who judgest another's servant? To his own lord he standeth or falleth."

....If you have fasted for two days, do not think yourself better than one who has not fasted. You fast and are peevish; the other eats and is pleasant.

You work off your irritability and hunger by quarreling; the other eats moderately and gives thanks to God....

Don't over-dramatise your crosses

For our salvation the Son of God became the Son of Man.... He held the world in his little hand but he was contained in a narrow manger.

I say nothing of the thirty years He lived obscure and content with his parents' poverty. He is scourged and says not a word. He is crucified and prays for his crucifiers.

...But we are annoyed if our food lacks flavor and imagine we are doing God service when we drink water with our wine.

Picture paradise

Step out, I beg you, a little from your body and picture above your eyes the reward which "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man."

What will be the splendor of that day when Mary, the Lord's mother, shall come to meet you, attended by her virgin bands?

...Then shall the hundred and forty and four thousand hold their harps before the throne and before the elders and sing a new song.

And no man will know that song but the company appointed: "These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth."

Whenever the world's vain display allures you, whenever you see in the world something glorious, pass over in mind to Paradise.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter....

From St. Jerome, Select Letters, translated by F. A. Wright, Loeb Classical Library, @ EWTN.