This is how much you are loved:
“God loves us as he loves himself. The Father does not love us any less than he loves his only-begotten Son. In other words, with an infinite love. God does not love less, because he loves first, from the very beginning!” (Pope Leo, Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and Elderly)
A beautiful commentary from Leiva-Merikakis on the Bridegroom’s love for us in his Passion: “The arrival of this Passover has on Jesus the same effect as would the arrival of his wedding date on a bridegroom who is madly in love. The leaders say, ‘Not during the feast!’ But Jesus insists: ‘Yes! During the feast! For this Passover is my wedding feast with my Bride, mankind, a union to be consummated in my blood.'”
Sarah Clarkson for the win every single time.
Lent is the season in which I rediscover love.
But when I first began to attempt the ‘practise’ of Lent, I mostly equated Lent with law. With repentance, yes, and under grace, I know. After all, Lent ends with Easter and a feast to mark salvation. But since discovering this season of the church, I’ve often seen ‘the penitential season’ as a time in which I made laws of discipline to express my true contrition, to prove to God that my sorrow over all the ways I sin and fail is real.
Lent dawned bright this year in England, bright as my good intentions. On the day when much of the church begins a season of repentance, the sun blinked and gleamed in a stark blue sky and birds whistled as if it were May and the daffodils in the vase on my desk finally bloomed.
But that evening, after a long day, after a service in which the ashes of repentance were crossed into my forehead and those of my children, I looked down the long trail of the coming days, and all I saw was grey. I was weary and afraid, doubtful that I could keep strict laws or great fasts. Part of me so yearned for spiritual renewal that I felt willing to attempt a great effort in order to gain a deeper sense of spiritual life. But my body, my heart felt too busy and sleep-deprived to keep up the strictures of dawn devotion or the renunciation of chocolate. (You know?)
You can read the rest here.
I am looking over some notes I took on a book I read quite awhile ago that struck me as very profound, Only Love Creates, by Father Fabio Rosini. (I believe it’s the only book of his that is translated into English.) I had it checked out from our library for so, so long but finally returned it so someone else might have the opportunity to read it. As I said, today I was looking over the notes that I had taken while reading it. Here is just a snippet from the introduction.
“Why does Jesus know how to love? Because he’s loved. He is, and he lives in, a gift—namely, that the Father begot him, gave him being, gave him all of himself.”
“In John 13:23-25 there is a person called ‘the beloved disciple’ who at the Last Supper makes a gesture and reclines his head on Jesus’s chest. At that moment he has an intimate dialogue with Jesus concerning Judas’s betrayal:
One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, ‘Lord, who is it?’
“In that moment he feels Jesus’s heart beat with love for Judas. It’s from that moment that he’s called the ‘beloved disciple,’ not before, because he encountered love. ‘He reclined his head on the chest’ of Jesus: that expression has already appeared at the end of the prologue at the beginning of John’s Gospel, where there is an extraordinary hymn that, toward the end, says, ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ (John 1:18). This is the same image, that of a little boy curled up against his daddy. Jesus is always attached to, turned toward, and aimed at the Father, and the beloved disciple does the same thing with Jesus, listening to his heart.”
I have been plagued by Jansenism most of my life, and Lent can be an especially difficult challenge in that regard. But over the past couple of years, God has been freeing me of this heresy by his sovereign intervention in my life and by writings like this by Joshua Elzner (building on my years of reading Thérèse). You can see that I have read and reread these pages a few times now. I share them with hope that your eyes may also be opened to the true heart of virtue.
Wrote this five years after the previous poem. Slow learner.
“Faith teaches that God loves us and that he loves us not as a group, but personally, individually: He loved me! Each of us can make these words of the Apostle Paul his own without fear of error. He knows my name; he has engraved my image in his heart. Still more, I can be assured that his heart is all mine, because our Lord cannot love as we do, by halves; when he loves, he loves with his whole heart, infinitely.
“Souls sometimes say, with a mixture of love and ignorance, ‘I wish our Lord would love me more.’ But is that possible? Can he who loves infinitely love any more? If nothing else existed in the world except God and you, O soul who reads these lines, he would not love you any more than he does right now. If you were the only object of his love, he would love you just as he loves you now.” (Luis Maria Martinez)
Thinking a lot this morning about the Samaritan woman who practiced social distancing every day–going to well at noonday when no one else was there. Yet, here is Jesus meeting her at that exact time, coming to her, bringing Himself to her. He desires to do the same for each of us, wherever we are in our isolation and sin. Look for Him to come to you.
Witnesses to Hope 