Nothing but God
True love overcomes every obstacle, accepts every situation, makes any sacrifice to unite itself with him whom it loves.
If we wish to be united to God, we must do exactly what the Word did to become united to human nature: he followed a path of prodigious self-abasement, of infinite humanity. Here these open before us the path of total abnegation, “the way of the nothing.” “All, nothing, all, nothing!” is the lullaby that St. John of the Cross sings to his God made man. “To come to possess all , desire the possession of nothing . . . Because if you desire to have something . . . your treasure in God is not purely your all” (Asc 1, 13:11-12).
God will be our everything, the soul’s only treasure, when the soul, in order to possess him, is able to renounce every earthly good, even itself, in a perfect spirit of poverty and humility. Compared to the annihilation of the eternal Word, this program should not appear to us too austere and exacting. For anyone who loves Jesus, there can be nothing more spontaneous and desirable than to follow him and adapt oneself to him.
To repay his infinite love, to prove our love for him, let us resolve to strip ourselves above all of selfishness, pride, vanity, all our righteous pretensions. What a striking contrast between these vain pretensions of self and the touching humility of the incarnate Word! St. Paul repeats: “Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God . . . emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2:5-7). Who would not love him who loves us so much?
No comments:
Post a Comment