Category: love/mercy of God

“for you loved them . . .”

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

This morning I opened my Liturgy of the Hours to the Office of Readings for today (Tuesday, Week II, Ordinary Time).  The first psalm to be prayed is Psalm 44.  In the American Liturgy of the Hours, before each psalm there are two subheadings.  The first is a summary of the psalm.  The second is a Scripture verse or a saying of the Fathers that situates the psalm in the context of its New Testament fulfillment in Christ.    “… the Fathers of the Church saw the whole psalter as a prophecy of Christ and the Church and explained it in this sense…” (Bl. John Paul II).  I try to make it a habit of pausing before I pray each psalm to reflect on the two subheadings, especially so I can pray them remembering how they are fulfilled in Christ.

The first subheading for Psalm 44 is “The misfortune of God’s people”.  An apt summary.  The psalm describes national disaster and a search for God in the midst of it.  “Awake, O Lord, why do you sleep?  Why do you hide your face from us and forget our oppression and our misery?”

From that first subheading to the second, I have drawn an arrow in my book.  The reason is to draw my attention to the wonderful news that we have in Christ.  The second subheading is this from Romans 8.37: “We triumph over all these things through him who loved us.”  What a wonderful word!

Open all your windows

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

Something from Amy Carmichael:

1 John 4:18  There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.  For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.

Let us take time today to consider the love of God.

Some of us are tempted to fear about ourselves.  What about tomorrow?  Shall we be able to go on?  Perfect love casts out fear.  Love God and there will be no room for fear, for to love is to trust and if we trust we do not fear.

Some of us are tempted to fear the future.  There again perfect love casts out fear.  He who has led will lead.  It quickens love and encourages faith to think of all that God has done.  He has not brought us so far, to leave us now.

So let us open all our windows and our doors to the great love of God.  Love is like light.  It will flood our rooms if only we open to it.  Let us take time today to open more fully than ever before to the blessed love of God.

Throwing ourselves into His arms

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

I am thinking so much about this quote of St. Thérèse’s that I just have to repost this post from a couple of years ago–in case any of you missed it or if, like me, you need to be reminded of it:

This morning I was pondering my failings and starting to move to discouragement–as I am too often prone to do–when the Lord in His mercy brought to mind a section of a letter from St. Thérèse to Fr. Bellière in which she describes the ideal way for us to come to our heavenly Father when we realize our faults.  Reading it always brings me great hope–and I hope it does the same for you:

I would like to try to make you understand by means of a very simple comparison how much Jesus loves even imperfect souls who confide in Him:
I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient, and when he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart the feeling that he deserves to be punished; and his brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father’s arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it he will be good from now on, and if this child asked his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows.  He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by the heart . . . . I say nothing to you about the first child, dear little Brother, you must know whether his father can love him as much and treat him with the same indulgence as the other . . .  (LT 258)

I pray that you will have the confidence to take God by His heart today and boldly ask Him to punish you with a kiss.

The sturdiness of God

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

From Fr. André Louf:

“The Hebrew word for faith (emûnah) derives from the stem emeth, faithfulness, one of God’s greatest attributes.  God is merciful and faithful (hesed we’ emeth, Gen 24.27).  We might as well say, tender and tough.  For emeth evokes the image of a rock on which we can lean or build.  God will not move; we can always count on him.  Our faith is a the act of leaning on the toughness or ‘sturdiness’ of God.  The liturgical word ‘Amen’ has the same stem.  To say ‘Amen’ is above all to believe; it is the act of affirming the sturdiness of God as it comes through to us from his Word or from the person of Jesus.  The Apocalypse of John says of Jesus that he is at once amen and pistos — faithful (Rev. 3.14).  He is faithful in two directions.  It is his privilege boundlessly and, as it were, recklessly to lean against his Father, because he as no other may count on his Father’s power and ‘sturdiness’.  Similarly in his relation to us he becomes the eminently sturdy and powerful one against whom we on our part may lean just as recklessly and boundlessly.”

Be reckless today!

But if we find grace

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

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Judas, Peter

because we are all
betrayers, taking
silver and eating
body and blood and asking
(guilty) is it I and hearing
him say yes
it would be simple for us all
to rush out
and hang ourselves
but if we find grace
to weep and wait
after the voice of morning
has crowed in our ears
clearly enough
to break our hearts
he will be there
to ask us each again
do you love me

Luci Shaw

Loving with Mary

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

This morning as I woke up, I began thinking again about contemplating our Lord’s Passion with Mary.  I was immediately struck by the thought of how much of her time and love was spent through these difficult days in loving those that Christ loved.  Peter would surely have flown to her after his denial.  How lost John must have felt after his flight in the garden.  Mary Magdalen and Mary and Martha (and Lazarus) of Bethany would have faced their own devastation.  There was the bitter anger at Judas that pervaded them all.  And so on with all of them. But just as Jesus gave her to us through John at the Cross, so He would have been urging her in the same way (by His Spirit) to go out to those He loved so much.

Perhaps your Triduum will be filled with the demands of others and you would rather be focusing more “directly” upon our Lord.  Perhaps it is His Spirit urging you to go where His Mother is going.  In following her and loving whomever she is loving, you will in fact be loving our Lord who loves them more than you do.

Entering Holy Week

Sr. Dorcee, beloved4 Comments

Entering Holy Week

by Catherine Doherty.

This is the hour of faith. We are going to need faith, because Holy Week, in a manner of speaking, will show us the reign of the prince of darkness, who rejoiced on Good Friday because he killed God, or so he thought.

One picture has haunted me throughout the years. It is Christ hanging on the cross while many who have benefited by his goodness—the halt, the lame, and the blind—are saying to him, “If you are who you say you are, come down from that cross and we shall believe you.”

How many miracles have happened to us, individually?

This is the week for meditating on how much we are loved. If there is anyone who thinks that he or she is not loved, let him follow the Holy Week liturgies, and he will know with what love we are all loved.

For those of us who do know a little of that love, let this week be a week of loving others, for no one can receive the infinite love of God without passing it on. God meant it to be that way. If we kept it for ourselves, it would break us.

It seems that each of us is always to have empty hands—to have our sinner’s heart with all its hostility, pain, and sin—yet a heart that is always turned to God. He who loves sinners has to come into our hearts again and again and constantly give us the mercy of his love.

Let us acknowledge this and let us share this love, emptying it onto the other, whoever he might be. It is immaterial who, for when one is loved by God, one loves everybody, because God lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust.

God’s love pouring into us is poured out to the other, and then another Niagara of his love comes in. It never stops.

When I think I have nothing to give, lo and behold, the cascade of God’s love passes through me and I am renewed. I can give again, because God became man, dispossessing himself.

When you fall in love with God, the desire for dispossession becomes like a fire in your heart, because when one falls in love, one wants to identify with the beloved. It has always been thus and still is.

The Gift of Tears

Russians say that this is the week of the gift of tears. We believe that there is a gift of tears that comes from the Holy Spirit. We say that it washes away our sins and the sins of mankind. Silence and tears and a contrite heart God will not reject.

This is the week of confession and also the week of overcoming sins, because it is one week in the year when we know that, while we can’t overcome our sins, Christ can.

As one of our MH priests has said, “During most of this holy season of Lent, you have to work at living Lent, but then comes the time when you no longer have to carry Lent. The liturgy is so strong, so powerful, that it just carries you. The strength and power at work in the Church carries us all through Holy Week.”

When you think of this holy week, it’s like a shiver passing through you. It is the mercy of God and his love for you. And because you are caught up in it, held by it, immersed in it, your soul opens up and you cease to be afraid. The God-man has erased your fear.

In this Holy Week, let us join hands in deep forgiveness of one another. Let us reconcile ourselves to whomever we are not reconciled. Let us each enlarge the circle of love in our hearts so that it can encompass the humanity that flows near us. Such is the love of God: mercy flows from it. Forgiveness is part of it. Humility sings a song to it. This truly is a week that is holy!

Let all of this sink into you, for God is with us every moment. He is present right now. Let his love, his simplicity, his ordinariness, and his extraordinariness—all of him—enter your heart, and then you will know why this week is called holy.

— Adapted from Season of Mercy, pp. 79-81, available from MH Publications.

” . . . slain with such fire of love”

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

“St. Catherine of Siena ‘speaks of the crucified Jesus as “slain with such fire of love. . . as seems insatiable.  Yet still he thirsts, as if saying: ‘I have greater ardor and desire and thirst for your salvation that I am able to show you, [even] with my Passion.’ ”  Catherine could only descrive the God she encountered as ‘crazed with love.'”  (from Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire by Fr. Joseph Langford)

No obstacles for the Beloved

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

The love of our Beloved for us:

One morning during the daily Bible reading on our mission compound in Palestine, our little Arab nurse read from Daily Light a quotation from the Song of Songs, “The voice of my Beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills” (Song of Songs 2.8).  When asked what the verse meant, she looked up with a happy smile of understanding and said, “It means there are no obstacles which our Savior’s love cannot overcome, and that to him, mountains of difficulty are as easy as an asphalt road!” (from the preface to Hinds feet on High Places, Hannah Hurnard)

First and foremost

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

I am struck, on this Feast of Exaltation of the Holy Cross, by Sr. Ruth Burrows meditation in Magnificat.  She clarifies the message of the cross:

“Holding up the cross, bidding us gaze into that bleeding, humiliated face, the Holy Spirit’s focus is not first and foremost on suffering, of even on sin and its consequences, but on a love that is absolute, ‘out of this world,’ ‘other,’ ‘what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived.’  We must gaze and gaze with fullest attention and then affirm: this is God; this is what God is really like.”

Do your best today to keep your gaze with fullest attention on this Love.