Don Guanella loved simplicity, concreteness and abhorred everything that was false, false, artificial. So it was also in devotion and religious practice that he didn't want polluted by sentimentality, by easy enthusiasm. Everything had to be based on a profound faith and on the daily exercise of fraternal charity towards whoever one had to deal with during the day.
Once he had an inkling that the readings of the nuns at S. Maria di Lora were not what he wanted and he asked, speaking to the nuns:
— Be sincere, tell me which books you read and give to the novices to meditate on?
None of the interviewees wanted to answer, but after repeated insistence, it turned out that the readings were all of the type: Gold straws, Eucharistic sparks, Dewdrops...
"I had imagined it," said Don Guanella, blessed martorellas, don't you understand that they are all sweetish pages full of sentimentality? that exclamations, sighs, dots are more than words? To live, you need nutritious foods, real foods: stuff that sustains you even if you struggle to chew it. You can't live on candies! Much better hard bread, better cheese crusts than that stuff that is worth eating air. You are not butterflies, nor crickets, nor grasshoppers: nothing but drops of dew are needed for you, martorellas, called to be little martyrs of love and pain!