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May 2 - May 4, 2021
Virginity is really the whole offering of soul and body to be consumed in the fire of love and changed into the flame of its glory.
Each saint has his special work: one person’s work. But Our Lady had to include in her vocation, in her life’s work, the essential thing that was to be hidden in every other vocation, in every life. She is not only human; she is humanity.
in contemplating her we find intimacy with God, the law which is the lovely yoke of the one irresistible love.
Strangely enough, those who complain the loudest of the emptiness of their lives are usually people whose lives are overcrowded, filled with trivial details, plans, desires, ambitions, unsatisfied cravings for passing pleasures, doubts, anxieties and fears; and these sometimes further overlaid with exhausting pleasures which are an attempt, and always a futile attempt, to forget how pointless such people’s lives are.
At the beginning it will be necessary for each individual to discard deliberately all the trifling unnecessary things in his life, all the hard blocks and congestions; not necessarily to discard all his interests forever, but at least once to stop still, and having prayed for courage, to visualise himself without all the extras, escapes, and interests other than Love in his life:
The purpose for which human beings are made is told to us briefly in the catechism. It is to know, love, and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
Yet it is really through ordinary human life and the things of every hour of every day that union with God comes about.
He is the Way, but He is not limited as we are: He can manifest Himself in countless ways we do not dream of.
There is, however, one big thing we can do with God’s help, that is, we can trust God’s plan, we can put aside any quibbling or bitterness about ourselves and what we are.
Whatever we are gives form to the emptiness in us which can only be filled by God and which God is even now waiting to fill.
She was not asked to do anything herself, but to let something be done to her.
He asked for her ordinary life shared with Joseph. She was not to neglect her simple human tenderness, her love for an earthly man, because God was her unborn child.
We are all asked if we will surrender what we are, our humanity, our flesh and blood, to the Holy Spirit and allow Christ to fill the emptiness formed by the particular shape of our life. The surrender that is asked of us includes complete and absolute trust; it must be like Our Lady’s surrender, without condition and without reservation.
What we shall be asked to give is our flesh and blood, our daily life—our thoughts, our service to one another, our affections and loves, our words, our intellect, our waking, working, and sleeping, our ordinary human joys and sorrows—to God.
the world does not accept Christ’s values. The Beatitudes are madness to the world. “Blessed are the poor, the mourners, the reviled, the persecuted, the calumniated; blessed are those who hunger and thirst after Justice.”
Her example here teaches us wisdom, when misunderstandings arise because of Christ conceived in us. There is little gained by trying to explain.
Love is more effective then than words. The only thing to do is to go on loving, to be patient, to suffer the misunderstanding.
There is only one cure for fear—trust in God. That is why the beginning of Christ’s being formed in us consists in echoing Our Lady’s fiat; it is a surrender, a handing over of everything to God.
We are afraid of birth, of the pain, the crudity, the fierceness of birth, of the responsibility of the new life. We are afraid of life, of its continual demand on us, of its continual challenge to us: we are afraid of pain, of sickness, and of the pains and sickness of others.
We have had it instilled into us since we were in the cradle that the one security is money, money alone can save us. If we were a spiritually virile people, we should not worship money but should be grateful for it; it would simply be the symbol of work that satisfied us as men and women and provided the good bread, the warm wool, the fire in the hearth, and the sweetness of sleep in the home.
Small wonder is it that gradually, without knowing it, we have come to trust more in money than in God.
Fed in this soil of vanity and fear and folly, the love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.
What is certain about Him is that He is love, that He loves both you and the person that you love, more than you do.
Your child is first of all God’s child; your love for your little son is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, beside God’s love for him.
indeed all this love of yours is only God’s love which you sense vaguely.
God asks for extreme courage in love;
We are apt to treat God in this way, to offer Him the thing we shall enjoy ourselves.
In this great fiat of the little girl Mary, the strength and foundation of our life of contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will set us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love.
