9781644135945

The Time After Pentecost
Prayer
O God, our refuge and strength, the very Author of godliness, hear the devout prayers of Thy
Church and grant that what we confidently ask we may efficaciously obtain. Through Christ
our Lord. Amen.
Thursday
“And this I pray, that your charity may more and more abound in knowledge and in all understanding;
that you may approve the better things; that you may be sincere and without
offense unto the day of Christ” (Epistle). The “day of Christ,” the day of our death and of the
Last Judgment, is near at hand. Not a minute should be lost. It is imperative that we grow in
the love of Christ Jesus.
God desires from us perfect love. “He, answering, said: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind;
and thy neighbor as thyself ” (Lk 10:27). God has commanded us to love Him. Indeed, the
commandment to love God is the first and most important of all the commandments. This
commandment knows no limits. Love is an insatiable good; it has no measure, it never rests
satisfied. Man, of course, can never love God as He deserves to be loved, he will never be able
to fulfill perfectly the command to love. He must always strive to increase in love, to “love with
[his] whole soul, and with all [his] strength.” That love must steadily increase until our death.
We are making a pilgrimage to heaven, a pilgrimage that involves a continual wandering. As
long as we have not reached our goal in eternity, continual progress in virtue is a sacred duty.
Woe to us should we ever reach the point where we say I shall love God just so much and no
more! With such an attitude we could not fulfill the first and greatest of commandments; and
if we neglect this first of the commandments, how shall we fulfill the others? That is why the
liturgy is so insistent on our continual growth in charity.
Perfect charity requires the complete conquest of all self-seeking, the destruction of indolence
and envy, of all impatience and false judgment. It requires the complete abandonment
of all purely natural ways of thinking and acting. It permits no routine or worldly manner of
acting. It demands the conquest of pride and of all inordinate desires; it requires the sacrifice
of all that is opposed to a godly spirit, or that hinders our progress in the spiritual life and in the
perfect love of God. However, perfect love involves not merely the mortification of our senses
and of our spirit; it requires also the powerful operation of God in our soul by means of spiritual
dryness, temptation, suffering, and humiliation. Once God begins to operate in a soul, that soul
undertakes all its works and actions for God. It then attributes nothing to itself, but everything
to God. In all things it looks to Him, to His continual presence, and to His love. “But he who
is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (1 Cor 6:17). Such a soul knows only love, and its works are
the works of a pure and perfect love. The Lord brings it about that such a perfect soul knows
everything that it should know, thinks as it should think, forgets what it should forget, loves
what it should love, and loves nothing outside of God or apart from God. O precious life of
love! One act of perfect love is of greater value in the eyes of God and of greater benefit to the
Church than all the imperfect works of the entire world. “And this I pray, that your charity may
more and more abound” (Epistle).
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