Aug 09 2009
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
From a letter dated 1940:
Should we strive for perfect love, you ask? Absolutely. For this we were created. [Perfect love] will be our eternal life, and here we have to seek to come as close to it as possible. Jesus became incarnate in order to be our way. What can we do? Try with all our might to be empty; the senses mortified; the memory as free as possible from all images of this world and, through hope, directed toward heaven; the understanding stripped of natural seeking and ruminating, directed to God in the straightforward gaze of faith; the will…surrendered to God in love.
This can be said very simply, but the work of an entire life would not attain the goal were God not to do the most essential. In the meantime we may be confident that he will not fail to give grace if we faithfully do the little we can do.
Edith Stein. Self Portrait In Letters. 1916-1942. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. pgs. 318-319
-Paul
Often we are preoccupied with the question “How can we be witnesses in the Name of Jesus? What are we supposed to say or do to make people accept the love that God offers them?” These questions are expressions more of our fear than of our love. Jesus shows us the way of being witnesses. He was so full of God’s love, so connected with God’s will, so burning with zeal for God’s Kingdom, that he couldn’t do other than witness. Wherever he went and whomever he met, a power went out from him that healed everyone who touched him. (See Luke 6:19.) If we want to be witnesses like Jesus, our only concern should be to be as alive with the love of God as Jesus was.
God will provide the graces, we need to be ‘alive to His love’ and ‘faithful in the little we can do.’
Rhetorically perhaps, how does a lay person with family responsibilities and a world being perpetually shoved in his or her face achieve this sort of spiritual silo-ing… keeping everything simultaneously visible and accessible but separated?
I know that the answer to this is that we can’t but God can. Letting him do that and surrendering to it is much more difficult than I think it should be for a seeker-of-God. But that is just my silly, petty complaint.
Paul, thank you; I’ll go to your link tomorrow.
I’ve been thinking about “the little we can do” and how it applies to our work for the Lord as well as to our own spiritual lives… Just to share something here amongst friends, I’m not particularly interested in stats or the site meter per se, but over at Consecrated to Mary I noticed on my dashboard that one day when I was away I received more hits than I’d ever received before on either of my blogs. I was wondering what it was all about. Do you know what post it was for? The novena prayer I’d posted last year in preparation for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now, it took very little time/effort to post that prayer, and I’m sure all of you with blogs or all of you in your daily lives can relate to this, in terms of all the little things you do for your families/friends/strangers, etc., and never know what the outcome is. But isn’t it encouraging once in a while to see what a small effort, instigated by God’s grace, can lead to? And it wasn’t so much that they had come to my site that filled me with joy, but the thought of all those people out there who had googled for a novena for the Assumption – that just made me so happy! Well, that’s my late-night rambling. I’ll probably be back tomorrow to re-read your comments and respond more coherently.
Terry, I know, I know…I guess we’ve explored that more than a few times here over the last three years! It seems to me it’s a constant movement towards embracing our state in life and working with it, rather than allowing ourselves to fall into the temptation of believing we are in the wrong place. God has placed us where He wants us, and our work is right where He’s placed us…and there’s no shortage of ways to grow in holiness and union with Him in the midst of family and work life, is there…