THE PASSION AND DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE LORD

                                                                     THE  GIFT OF SELF

"God is Love, and is therefore the Good, communicative of itself... to give of Himself is an essential movement of His Nature... His Free Will is captivated by the movement of His Love." 

Love is His Being. His Will is subject to the Self-emptying power of His Mighty Love. Wearing nothing but His cloak of Ignominy, we behold the Man of Sorrows Whose Passion reveals the depths of His Love: His Love pins Him to His Cross: In His Love He endures His loneliness, His abandonment, His isolation, and His tsunami of pain. 

                                  

                                                             LOVE IS HIS GIFT OF SELF.

                 "What power this gift has! ...It cannot fail to draw the Almighty to become one with our lowliness." 

                                                                  Our "lowliness". 

Our misery draws God... our "feeble love enslaves Him," captivates Him. 

When our free will is captivated by our desire to love Him, we begin to grow in self-knowledge.  And the awareness of our sins causes us to stumble on our own Via Dolorosa alongside our Beloved Savior this Good Friday,  When we skin our knees during our multiple falls under the weight of our pride, we are given to remember that it is Spirit Lord Who is endlessly inspiring a holy longing in our soul to pour ourselves, our will, our 'belongings', our security, into an ever-deeper self-abandonment into God's ocean of Love. 

                                                 In other words, to gift ourselves to God.

Maybe we may pause to wonder, during this Holy Week, are we too actually being invited to be so profoundly identified with our Savior, to love with His Love, to participate in His Redemptive Act of winning souls whom Jesus Lord can then give with great joy back to Our Father? To unite ourselves into Love, to give Him the total gift of 'myself'?

Could people whose lives are as ordinary as ours actually be called to such depths of holiness? Isn't that Way reserved for God's saints?

St Teresa of Avila answers our questions:

"... He didn't say, 'I will give drink to those whom I think fit for it'... He invites us all, without conditions..." 

Our great saint was teaching us that there is no two-tier holiness, that holiness is friendship with God and that He desires to call all of us His 'friend'.

 

And so we may further wonder... what measure of self should we give our Friend?

Once again, St Teresa of Jesus advises us:

"We think we are giving God everything, whereas what we are really offering Him is the revenue, or the fruits of our land while keeping the stock and the right of ownership of it in our own hands."

Perhaps these words of Teresa cause us to confront the reality that we have determinedly retained the right of ownership of everything God has given us. During our life-years, we have constructed illusions to avoid giving God the gift of self: illusions of self-importance, self-pride, self-opinion... these and many more 'selves'.  

We may have listened to and been imprisoned by the fears that the devil uses to paralyze our soul: if we give God ownership of our 'self', will He take our family, our bank account, our home, our loved ones? Our fears convince us that these losses will be the consequences of total self-surrender to Jesus Lord Whose own life and death encompassed all of these 'losses'. 

St Teresa speaks:

"He refuses to force our will. He takes what we give Him."

If all we can give Him is a mustard seed-measure of self, He grasps it with great joy because, "our feeble love enslaves Him". 

In Matthew 19, we hear Jesus Lord loving and reassuring response to our soul-destroying fears:

"...everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for 

my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life."

                                     Our God will never be outdone in generosity.

If we give Him ownership of family, He will grasp our gift and heal all the situations in our family that wound us deeply... the lost soul of a beloved brother, the illness of a grandmother, the daughter who has separated from us, the fear for a son bound over by addictions.

 

When we give over the rights of ownership to the "fruits of our land" as well as the "stock from the revenue," He will lovingly remind us that He is and always has been the CFO of our bank account and He will lead us to the purchase of a different "field" which, unlike our bank account, will not imprison our soul. It will transform our soul into the very likeness and beauty of our Savior Lord.

                           "...so that in eternal glory the Celestial Court shall marvel at the marked likeness of their features with my  Divine Countenance" (Our Lord Jesus Christ to St. Gertrude).

And while we are "still a great way off " (Luke 15:20), our Beloved Father will run all the way to meet us because He will behold in us the very Countenance of His own Son.

                   Our gift of self: the most perfect expression of love we can offer to God. 

                         

Quotations:

Blessed Marie Eugene of the Child Jesus. OCD

St. Teresa of Jesus OCD

St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face OCD

                                        

                                          

                            

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Anna Rae-Kelly OCDS
www.annaprae.com

GOD'S LENTEN BECKONING TO OUR SOULS

Across the world, souls who yearn for deeper awareness of God's Loving Merciful Presence in every moment, are now directing their gaze with excitement and holy joy toward Ash Wednesday. 

                        This is the time of God's beckoning.

We are being invited to encounter Him in new ways during our Lenten days; to accompany Him in the Holy Week prior to and during His Passion; to celebrate with Him and in Him with holy joy on Easter Sunday. When Spirit Lord draws us along this way of our soul's transformation, His Divine Inspirations are our beacons and we hear Him speak with words that have no sounds:

"Jesus needs neither books nor Doctors of Divinity in order to instruct souls; He, the Doctor of Doctors, He teaches without noise of words."

 

A deep yearning groans in our souls to "know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in our world," and Christ's passionate love for us and His Desire for Intimate Union with our soul fills us with silent awe. 

"Between God and the soul, secret things are always happening." 

And they are happening in the ordinariness of our days, unseen, intimately hidden as Holy Spirit speaks to us. As we surrender our selves, our opinions, our hopes, our families, our expectations, our control that was never ours, spiritual miracles begin to reshape our desires and transform our relationships. 

This is the Lenten time when Spirit Lord asks our permission to purify our soul. When we give our YES, our FIAT to Him, in the ordinariness of our Lenten days, in our common daily work, we allow Him to shift and discard the residual dross of our past sins that silences the Voice of the Divine Three Who dwell so humbly within our souls in love beyond all telling. 

When we give Him our permission to purify us during our Lenten pathway, Spirit Lord begins to transform us into the glorified being whom God has chosen to be His instruments of love:

"The Fire that purifies is an Intelligent Fire. It regulates the violence of Its Flame according to the effect It wants to produce."

Spirit Lord is the Flame. He knows what we look like in our glorified state in Heaven and the trials and the sufferings God permits us to endure are His tools of purification which will transform us into the glorified being God ordained us to be. 

Sufferings conform us to Christ Crucified. Yet at times, a quiet taunt of complaint may enter our thoughts....

"Does He not see our anguish and the burden that weighs us down? Why does He not come and comfort us? ...

He knows that it is the only means of preparing us to know Him as He knows Himself, and to become ourselves Divine!

"God already sees us in glory and rejoices in our everlasting bliss. I understand now why He lets us suffer."

During our Lenten purification, smiling through spiritual pain and suffering is difficult because in our weak and fragile humanity, spiritual trials may bruise us, and we find ourselves confronting that weapon so well utilized by satan ... discouragement. 

"Our whole being objects to the announced suffering. Our poor human nature and our faith need to be sustained. Let us say to Our Lord: Show me the distant light at the end of the tunnel so that we might walk towards this luminous point shining in the dark." 

And little Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face reminds us of some "how to" ways to walk away from discouragement and to walk to towards that luminous point in our darkness of purification, to assure Jesus Lord of our love for Him and to join Therese in winning souls for Him ... when she suffered much, instead of wearing a melancholy look, she would wear a smile; when she was in a state of spiritual dryness and couldn't pray, she looked for smallest trifles to please Jesus, like not crossing her ankles during long hours of community prayer; or speaking a kindly word when she would rather be silent; or when we have been wrongly accused we do not defend ourselves and so allow God to mete out the justice. 

Our Mother Mary, the Immaculata of the Holy Spirit, concludes our thoughts as we strain toward Ash Wednesday and our Lent of Transformation.

Blessed Marie-Eugene imagines the way our dear Mother looked at the dead body of her son Jesus taken down from the Cross and laid in her arms. 

Fr Marie-Eugene offers us a Lenten meditation:

"Maternally, you look at his wounds, his face, you discover his majesty and you kiss him. Allow us to kiss him after you: his forehead, his feet and his hands, the wound of his heart."

          Our Lenten journey into self-abandonment. self-emptiness and self-surrender to God's Will begins as we stand, silently, beside Christ's Mother and our Mother.

                 * ALL QUOTATIONS ARE FROM ST THERESE OF THE CHILD JESUS AND THE HOLY FACE (OCD) AND FROM BLESSED MARIE-EUGENE OF THE CHILD JESUS (OCD)

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Anna Rae-Kelly OCDS
www.annaprae.com