If it is beauty you want, I [God] am beauty. If you want goodness, I am goodness, for I am supremely good. I am wisdom. I am kind; I am compassionate; I am the just and merciful God. I am generous, not miserly. I give to those who ask of me, open to those who knock in truth, and answer those who call out to me. I am not ungrateful but grateful and mindful to reward those who will toil for me, for the glory and praise of my name. I am joyful, and I keep the soul who clothes herself in my will in supreme joy. I am that supreme providence who never betrays my servants’ hope in me in soul or body.
How can people see me feeding and nurturing the worm within the dry wood, pasturing the brute beasts, nourishing the fish in the sea, all the animals on the earth and the birds in the air, commanding the sun to shine on the plants and the dew to fertilize the soil, and not believe that I nourish them as well, my creatures made in my image and likeness? As a matter of fact, all this is done by my goodness to serve them. No matter where they turn, spiritually and materially they will find nothing but my deep burning charity and the greatest, gentle, true, perfect providence.
—Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, chap. 141, trans. Suzanne Noffke, in Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue (The Classics of Western Spirituality) (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 290
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