Cultivate your mind, your heart and your spirit in spiritual reading

Oct. 12I am appalled, my sister, the harm to souls deprived of reading holy books.Look how wild the holy fathers when urging the soul to such a reading. St. Bernard, in his cloister stairs, indicates that there are four steps or the means by which up to God and perfection, and says they are reading and meditation, prayer and contemplation. And to prove what he says uses the words of the divine Teacher, "Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened," and applying them to the 4/2 or degrees of perfection, says that with the reading of Scripture and the other holy books and devotees seeking God, meditation is found, with prayer calls his heart and contemplation one enters the theater of divine beauty, open to the gaze of our mind by reading , meditation and prayer.The reading continues elsewhere saint is like spiritual food given to the palate of the soul, meditation chews it with his speeches, prayer taste test, and contemplation is the same sweetness of this food of the spirit, which fully comfort and consolation to the soul. Reading stops in the crust of what is read; meditation penetrates to the heart, the prayer goes after him with questions; delights contemplation as something that already possesses.
(July 28, 1914, to Raffaelina Cerase - Letters. II, p. 138)