Lest You Remain

6 “You shall love the Lord your God” (Mt 22:37). If the most important reason to love our friends is that we are loved by them, could you not love God who loved you so much, that He gave His only Son for you? Besides, think what you were before He created you. You were nothing, just a pile of dust. While He, directed by His love for you, made you in His image. Why should not you love Him? If only vessels knew their creators and pictures and statues their authors, they could talk to them. They surely would love them, for the beauty which they owe to their hands and they might even be more faithful in love than you are toward your Creator whom you accept, get to know and contemplate. Contemplate, if someone bought you out of hard slavery, with what service would you return such an act of kindness? What kind of love would you have for your great benefactor! Jesus Christ is the one who paid the price of His Blood rather than money, to get you out of the slavery of eternal death. With what flames of love for Him do you burn? While leaving the Holy Table unmoved, didn’t you give yourself to vain amuse- ments, talkativeness, laughter, jokes, empty cheerfulness and great distraction? How ungrateful! How inhuman! You deserve the eternal fires of hell! Think how indebted you would be, to thank someone who had rescued you, if you had fallen into a cave in a secluded place, or in the woods. Yet you have received such benefit from the Holy Spirit numerous times! Besides having called you to the Catholic faith, which freed you from the abyss of hell prepared for the unfaithful, He calls you with His daily callings from so many dangers! How many times, when prompted by your nature, you fall in the same abyss of hell, He mercifully rescues you by giving you the recognition of your sins, allowing you the gift of contrition and inciting you to receive the holy Sacraments? Thanks to them, you have regained your salvation, as many times as you have forfeited it. Convinced by these benefits from God, love Him. And cry out with David: “I love you, O Lord, my strength” (Ps 17:2). ( Inspectio Cordis ) L EST Y OU R EMAIN W ITHOUT W ORK IN THE V INEYARD OF THE L ORD 140