Hello, I'm Father Joe Roche of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception.

Thank you for joining us as we continue with our year-long journey,

reading the diary of St. Maria Faustina Kavalska from beginning to end.

Today, we take up from where we left off, beginning with Diary Entry Number 118.

The tongue is a small member, but it does big things.

A religious who does not keep silence will never attain holiness. That is, she will never become a saint.

Let her not delude herself, unless it is the spirit of God who is speaking through her,

for then she must not keep silent. But in order to hear the voice of God, one has to have silence

in one's soul, and to keep silence, not a gloomy silence, but an interior silence, that is to say, recollection in God.

One can speak a great deal without breaking silence, and on the contrary one can speak little and be constantly breaking silence.

Oh, what irreparable damage is done by the breach of silence.

We cause a lot of harm to our neighbor, but even more to our own selves.

In my opinion, and according to my experience, the rule concerning silence should stand in the very first place.

God does not give himself to a chattering soul, which, like a drone in a

beehive, buzzes around but gathers no honey. A talkative soul is empty inside. It lacks both the

essential virtues and intimacy with God. A deep interior life, one of gentle peace and of that silence where the Lord

dwells, is quite out of the question. A soul that has never tasted the sweetness of inner

silence is a restless spirit which disturbs the silence of others. I have seen many souls in the depths of hell,

for not having kept their silence. They told me so themselves when I asked them what was the cause of

their undoing. These were souls of religious. My God, what an agony it is to think that they not only might have been in heaven, but they might even have become saints.

O Jesus, have mercy.

I tremble to think that I have to give an account of my tongue.

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