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.'”
There are so many possible words from St. Bernard to share here, but I must share these wonderful words about to whom we should look in our troubles:
O you, whoever you are, who feel that in the tidal wave of this world you are nearer to being tossed about among the squalls and gales than treading on dry land, if you do not want to founder in the tempest, do not avert your eyes from the brightness of this star. When the wind of temptation blows up within you, when you strike upon the rock of temptation, gaze up at this star, call out to Mary. Whether you are being tossed about by the waves of pride or ambition or slander or jealousy, gaze up at this star, call out to Mary. When rage or greed or fleshly desires are battering the skiff of your soul, gaze up at Mary. When the immensity of your sins weighs you down and you are bewildered by the loathsomeness of your conscience, when the terrifying thought of judgment appalls you and you begin to founder in the gulf of sadness and despair, think of Mary. In dangers, in hardships, in every doubt, think of Mary, call out to Mary. Keep her in your mouth, keep her in your heart. Follow the example of her life and you will obtain the favor of her prayer. Following her, you will never go astray. Asking her help, you will never despair. Keeping her in your thoughts, you will never wander away. With your hand in hers, you will never stumble. With her protecting you, you will not be afraid. With her leading you, you will never tire. Her kindness will see you through to the end.
A Sunday-poem about the way God wants to communicate Himself to us through everything He has created:
THE TRUE APPEARANCE OF THE WORD
As the cataract of ignorance falls
from off the eyesight of my soul,
I realize that all this huge Creation
round about me is the Word.
The hitherto quite unattended fact
that these familiar fingers number ten,
like an encounter with some miracle,
suddenly astonishes me
and the newly-opened forsythia flowers
in one corner of the hedge beyond my window
entrance me utterly,
like seeing a model of Resurrection.
Smaller than a grain of sand
in the oceanic vastness of the cosmos,
I realize that this my muttering
by a mysterious grace of the Word,
is no imagined thing, no mere sign,
but Reality itself.
~ Ku Sang (1919-2004), Korean poet
I’m leaving tomorrow for a week long personal retreat at Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa. (See pictures below.) So, I decided to leave you four suggestions from the archives to read at your leisure this coming week: Don’t be afraid of being afraid, Parable of the Talents (1), Parable of the Talents (2), and Parable of the Talents (3).
You’ll be in my prayers.
I love to know and read people who really know the essence of life. They feed my soul. Dom Augustin Guillerand is one of these. His words are worth chewing on:
“This is the secret of peace, after committing a fault. What is past is past. And if we accept the consequences, while bracing our will, we can be sure that God will know how to draw glory even from our faults. Not to be downcast after committing a fault is one of the marks of true sanctity, for the saint knows how to find God in everything, in spite of human appearances. Once your will is sincerely “good,’ then don’t worry . . .
“In all that we do, and at every moment, God has ordained an exact balance between what we have to do and the necessary strength to do it; and this we call grace. Our part is to bring ourselves into line with grace.
“God uses all the horrors of this world for an infinitely perfect end, and always with an infinite calm. It is part of his plan that we should feel the blows and experience the wounds of life; but more than anything else he wants us to dominate them by virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and so live on his level. It is these latter which will raise us up to him, and then we shall share in his calm, and in the highest part of our being.” (Dom Augustin Guillerand, O.Cart.)
A guest post from Ann Voskamp: “What to do on Hard Days” The devil hates singing . . .
It’s time for Amy Carmichael:
“Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer, began when he was old to write the story of his life. He made this rule for himself: ‘Try to give everything narrated a kind twist.'”
How would our lives look to us if we practiced doing that?
She goes on to say:
“Isn’t that such a beautiful rule? Let us ask the Spirit of God to search us about this matter of giving a ‘kind twist’ to what others say and do.”
Pray for me, and I’ll pray for you.
When one thinks of the Transfiguration one usually thinks of Christ being transfigured–almost like Christ turning on a light bulb. But there is a valid line of thinking in the Eastern Church that goes like this: “In a certain way it was really the apostles who were transfigured; it was they who became able to see.” It wasn’t so much Christ whose glory changed; the apostles were just allowed to see Him as He truly is. Christ opened their eyes so that they could see Him in all His glory.
And that’s the point of the Christian life, to have our eyes opened to the Mystery of God. To constantly surrender ourselves to His grace, that the eyes of our hearts may be transfigured and more and more able to perceive the beauty and glory of our God.
Witnesses to Hope 