The Lord is Coming – Take Him to your Heart
Taking Christ to heart is necessary if one is to be faithful in one’s service to God. Blessed Elisabeth also exhorted the new sister “to raise” herself up in strength and “to surrender” her whole being to the Lord. The total trust in the Lord haunts these words. We must use our strength to raise ourselves up and not allow ourselves to be bogged down by the anxieties and concerns of this life. Once raised up, we must surrender not just for a moment and not just what is comfortable, but everything to God. Such raising up and surrender is impossible without God – but the Lord himself is our hope. Something in these words apply to every life, no matter how busy or active or frantic. Because to live the Christian life well in whatever our calling we must welcome Jesus into our hearts all the time and never lose sight of Him. This is a matter of interior discipline where we continually turn our thoughts back to the Lord, keeping them all under the “exceedingly great” love of God, “until He consumes you both night and day” (P123, 22 Oct 1906).
To take the Lord to our hearts is to raise up, to surrender and to welcome with all our might the One who comes in love, the One who is Love. If we allow our vision to be raised up by faith, if we allow Him to hold our every thought captive in faith, we begin to see that He constantly comes to us in ever new ways and we glimpse how much He yearns to be greeted in love. Recollection in the silent adoration of our faith holds us in prayerful attentiveness to this divine visitation, this divine invasion of inexhaustible love flooding into our space and time. Such loving vigilance, with its attention raised above the work-a-day world and the claims of bliss echoing in the merely subjectively satisfying, allows Him to begin a new work in our lives. If we are faithful to this, the love of the Lord can consume our whole being, making us into fiery icons of his love.
Holiness is a gift which must be welcomed and fully lived out. It is not the fruit of passivity to the demands of love or of escape from the responsibilities entrusted to us in the brief span of life we have been granted in this world. Sanctity is not attainable by method or technique or any other attempt manipulate God or else raise oneself to His level. It is not the achievement of a lifetime – but rather an obedience unto death. Because the gift of holiness consists in a participation in God’s life, it is greater than our natural life and makes a claim on our whole being. But God would never ask so much if He were not going to supply all that we need for such a great undertaking. This is why He entrusts to us his very self – And He comes in the power of the Holy Spirit pulsating, communicating, enveloping, inundating us the “exceedingly great” love revealed on the Cross. We find new courage to take Him to our hearts because He takes us to His heart even more.
Great post! Thank you!
Beautiful and moving thoughts here! Thank you so much!
Hi,
I am the President of the National Association of "Friends of Fatima", founded in 1982 with the aim of spreading the message of Our Lady Fatima and recognized by the Catholic Church and the Italian State. I ask that you fillthe link to our official website on your site (we'll do the same). Waiting for reply, thanks.
http://amicidifatima.blogspot.com
Such very beautiful truth! Thank you for the encouragement and for showing us the image of what our life can be, the joy. I appreciate greatly your elaboration on the "raising up and surrender."