39 — THE DEVELOPMENT OF LOVE

Presence of God. — My God, who from eternity has prevented me with your infinite love, increase my love for you.

Meditation

1 — “Who will prevent God from doing what He wills in a resigned, naked, and annihilated soul?” (A. II, 4, 2). This saying of St. John of the Cross makes you understand that God immensely desires to work in your soul to lead you to holiness, to union with Him, provided you put yourself in His hands stripped of every attachment, annihilated in your self-love, totally docile to His action, totally malleable and movable. Through purifying trials, the Lord helps you to empty yourself, to detach yourself from creatures, helps you to clothe yourself in true humility, but at the same time helps you to grow in love, the great force that must unite you to Him. All the work that God accomplishes in your soul aims to make you progress in this virtue; exterior and interior trials, humiliations, impotencies, aridities, struggles, tempests have, in the divine plan, the purpose of extinguishing in you the fatal fires of self-love, of pride, of earthly affections and of every other disordered passion so that in you may blaze ever more intensely and vigorously a single fire, the fire of charity.

The more the Lord purifies you, the more your heart is freed from every dross and becomes capable of concentrating in Him all its affections. Walk, then, in this direction by accepting purification with a view to a fuller love and by orienting your whole spiritual life to the exercise of love. What you suffer, suffer for love, that is, suffer with good will, without resisting, without complaining and then, as your soul comes to be humbled, stripped, mortified, it will also be clothed with charity. The trials that God sends you not only have the purpose of making your heart purer, but also of dilating it in charity. They aim to dig in you a greater capacity for love, certainly not of sensible love, but of strong love of will, which tends to God with pure benevolence, independently of every personal comfort, in the sole search for His glory and His good pleasure.

2 — By means of purifying trials “God secretly instructs the soul in the perfection of love” (N. II, 5, 1). First of all He teaches it to love independently of every gladness and joy, depriving it even of that joy, so legitimate and spontaneous, that derives from awareness of its own love. The soul not yet fully purified could become attached to this joy and God entirely deprives it of it; the dense shadows take from it the consciousness of loving, the dry aridity extinguishes in it every gladness and sweetness and it is constrained to proceed with the pure act of the will. Rather than complacency in its love, which it no longer feels, the soul remains profoundly afflicted by the tormenting doubt of not knowing how to love and to combat this doubt has no other means than love, that is, to embrace with generosity whatever thing, whatever sacrifice pleases God. Precisely thus its love develops and becomes purer and stronger: purer because no personal comfort is mingled with it, stronger because it spurs it to more generous works. In this state the soul adheres to God with the sole act of the will, in which consists the substance of love: it wills well to God solely because He is the supreme Good, infinitely good; it wills Him alone and serves Him alone by accomplishing all His divine wills, without any return on itself, without any search for joy, for spiritual tastes; the soul is no longer concerned with enjoying its love, is no longer concerned with receiving, but its sole care is to give, to donate itself, to please God. From this you understand how aridity and shadows, far from suffocating love, make it grow wonderfully, provided the soul is disposed to walk seeking only God’s pleasure and forgetting itself totally.

“Learn to love as God wishes to be loved, and leave your personal manners...” (C. I, 57), St. John of the Cross tells you, that is, learn to love God with the pure and strong act of will, not concerning yourself with all that is sentiment, consolation, joy of heart. Perhaps your way of loving is still a bit too dependent on sentiment, and then thank the Lord if He makes you walk in shadows and aridity: in this way He will help you to free yourself from these weaknesses.

Colloquy

“O Lord of my soul and my sole Good, why do You not wish that as soon as the soul determines to love You and does what it can to detach itself from everything to serve You better, it should not immediately have the consolation of seeing itself in possession of true perfect love? But I have spoken badly. I ought to say complaining: why do we not will it? Yes, it is our fault if we do not immediately arrive at so great an honor!...

“If we succeeded in perfectly attaining true love, we would together have every other sort of good. But, my God, we are so avaricious and so slow in giving ourselves to You that we never determine to put ourselves in the dispositions to receive it, also because, being this love so precious, You exact that it not be enjoyed except at a dear price.

“There is nothing on earth that can buy such a treasure; but we would soon become possessors of it only if we did our best not to attach ourselves to the things of the world, placing all our care and conversation in those of heaven. Instead, O Lord, it happens that while we believe we are giving You everything, while in reality we give You only the income and the fruits, keeping for ourselves the capital and the property... Fine manner of seeking Your love! And then we want it immediately and with full hands.

“O Lord, if You do not give us this treasure all at once it is because we too do not give ourselves to You entirely. May it please You at least to give it to us drop by drop, even if for this we should undergo all the travails of the world.

“No, my God, love does not consist in tears nor even in those consolations and tendernesses that ordinarily are so desired and in which one recreates oneself. It consists instead in serving You with justice, with strength of soul and humility. Without this it would seem a receiving always and a never suffering anything.

“Do not permit, O Lord, that a thing of so great a price as Your love be given to persons who serve You only out of craving for spiritual consolations” (T.G. W. 11, 1-13).