More from Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire:
“You are precious to Him. He loves you, and He loves you so tenderly that He carved you on the palm of His hand. When your heart feels restless, when your heart feels hurt, when your heart feels like breaking, remember, I am precious to Him, He loves me. He has called me by name. I am His.” (Mother Teresa)
Continuing from Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire. In this selection, Fr. Langford comments on how much God delights in each one of us:
“God’s thirst for us is not dependent on who or how we are. His love is not about us, and does not depend on us–it is rather about him, about a God whose nature it is to love. Because God is free in loving us, he is likewise free to delight in us. Since only his freely given love makes us lovable, it is our willing acceptance of that love, our acceptance of his delight [in us], that transforms us and makes us ‘graceful’, and beautiful, and loving in turn.
“Even where there is no beauty in us, God’s love works its divine alchemy, rendering even the least of us beautiful.”
(Now, did you really read that–I mean, in the sense that it is the truth for you? 😉
I spent a good amount of time during my retreat last week at Our Lady of the Mississippi meditating on sections of Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire (Fr. Joseph Langford). I don’t think I have quoted very much from that book, and I don’t know why. It is a veritable treasure mine of truths about the love of God for us. And so I will sharing some of them with you over the course of the next few days. I hope they bless you as much as they do me.
“It is staggering to realize that the Father loves all of mankind with the same love, with the same magnitude and the same intensity, with which he loves his divine Son. . . it is God’s nature to love this way, to love with the entirety of his being, and he cannot love us any less.”
“Because God is infinite, his love is not divided, with each of us receiving but a portion. We each receive the totality, the fullness of divine love, twenty-four hours a day, every day of our lives.”
“. . . the only way to approach God’s thirst for us is to open to it, without insisting on understanding or being worthy. As theologian Karl Rahner observed, ‘Some things are understood not by grasping, but by allowing oneself to be grasped.'”
His love is burning. . . . His love is immeasurably ardent. It is as if I am all He has to love. (Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer)
I just wanted to remind you that I have started a new blog: Heart Arrows, little prayers that pierce the Heart of God. Its purpose is to provide a short prayer each day that you can pray all throughout the day. The name of the blog comes from the way that monks spoke of ejaculations–as arrows sent off to God. If the particular prayer for the day doesn’t strike you, you can still pray it as a form of intercession for someone (perhaps unknown to you) who may need the benefit of that prayer.
You will find only one post displayed each day. That is purposeful–to keep our prayer very, very simple and focused.
Some ideas on how to use this blog: write the prayer for the day on an index card and put it up over your kitchen sink; stick it on your dashboard; memorize it and pray it on the hour. Please share on the blog any creative ideas you may have.
Praying that this will be a help to many of you . . . to send those tiny arrows off to pierce the Heart of God all day long.
From the beginning of a newly published book, Amazing Nearness, by the author of The Gift of Faith, Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer:
In my daily life, I am constantly getting lost. Yet that means He can constantly find me. The more I need Him, the closer He is. I can ceaselessly discover that in weariness He sought me. This means loving until weary. Because of Original Sin He constantly searches for us to the point of weariness and exhaustion, humanly speaking.
In the Eucharistic encounter, Jesus regularly finds me quite lost. Yet, I am normally lost, needing to be found. So no need for regrets. If I am lost I can only be found in Eucharistic love. He can only find me when I am lost and beginning to search for Him. Love needs two. It is a grace always given to me to seek Him through faith, hope, and love.
Fr. Dajczer is here making a reference to the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in John 4. “Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well.” Augustine points out that Jesus is weary because He is on a journey to seek us each out. He is thirsty for our faith. He knows that we are lost and constantly sets out to find us. If you feel lost today, take heart that He is seeking you and looking for you. Let yourself be found by Him.
from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn’s We Have Found Mercy:
The Divine Mercy is a profound, total devotion that is committed, lasting, faithful, and quite personal for the one to whom it is addressed. Nothing could be more foreign to it than a vague feeling of ‘goodwill’ toward the whole world. The one on whom God bestows his mercy is intended, addressed and loved as an unrepeatable person. Mercy does not turn the one to whom it is shown into an object but rather touches the person in his center, in his dignity.
Jesus is, so to speak, the incarnation of God’s Mercy. In him, God cares, not about mankind as an abstract entity, but rather about every individual person. He has shown me mercy. Through Christ I become the recipient of God’s care, and, on the other hand, I am addressed personally.
Storms. God’s own fireworks.
He made the darkness his covering,
the dark waters of the clouds, his tent.
A brightness shone out before him
with hailstones and flashes of fire.
The Lord thundered in the heavens;
the Most High let his voice be heard.
He shot his arrows, scattered the foe,
flashed his lightnings, and put them to flight.
Beautiful words from Psalm 18, one of the psalms from Morning Prayer this morning. But even more marvelous are the verses that follow:
From on high he reached down and seized me;
he drew me forth from the mighty waters.
He snatched me from my powerful foe,
from my enemies whose strength I could not match.
They assailed me in the day of my misfortune,
but the Lord was my support.
He brought me forth into freedom,
he saved me because he loved me.
In the midst of your storm, God is coming to you. He is coming to you to save you. Because He loves you. Be not afraid of the storm.
from Amy Carmichael:
Ps 65.9 The river of God is full of water
Recently I was sent a picture of ajug into which water was being poured. The idea was that love, or whatever we need, is poured into us like that. I don’t think of it so at all. I think of the love of God as a great river, pouring through our ravine in flood time. Nothing can keep this love from opuring through us, except of course our own blocking of the river.
Do you sometimes feel that you have got to the end of your love for someone who refuses and repulses you? Such a thought is folly, for one cannot come to the end of what one has not got. We have no store of love at all. We are not jugs, we are riverbeds.
If there be hindrance, sweep it all away;
O Love Eternal, pour through me I pray.
I must re-post my favorite picture for this Feast of the Sacred Heart. This is by James Tissot. (And don’t miss the quote at the end. It’s just for you.)
We are all in the Heart of Jesus Christ, since He loves us all, for the way of love is for the lover to lodge the beloved in his heart. (Fr. Timothée de Raynier)
Witnesses to Hope 