Entrusting to Jesus

From a journal entry:

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Jesus, I need your help. This is too great and wonderful for me. To love another and so to love you more, and to love you and so to love another more. It is possible, is it not? To have this: the more I love the one, the more I love the other. Surely in my heart my great desire is to love without end.

I wonder how it is that I continue finding these Theresian themes cropping up in my life. “My vocation is to love” she said. Perhaps if I had chosen a different saint for my patron when I was confirmed I would have seen the development of things attributed to them instead.

Dear Therese said that she would spend her heaven doing good on earth. Well, I want to spend my earth living as if heaven is already here. It is my firm conviction that it in fact is. “The kingdom of God is within you.” Which is greater, the Lord of the land or the land, the kingdom? The Lord! And does not the Lord of the Kingdom of Heaven dwell within me? Have I not been baptized into his death and become a part of his body? Have I not begun to enter into his very life, or as Peter writes, to be a partaker of the diving nature? So what prevents me from living accordingly?

I do.

I do not want to let go of my pride. . . . I do not fully trust Jesus. My pride says to me, “I am your only sure guarantee that you will not be lost, that your identity will not fade away, that you will be able to maintain your grasp, your hold on being important. If you let go you may be so fully assimilated into Him that both the world and God shall forget you. . . you will not even be a memory.”

While illogical, that is a very compelling argument. For, that is the greatest fear of selfishness: being forgotten by all, especially by the person in whom it resides.

But we do not lose our identity in allowing the love of God to overwhelm us. We do not become oblivious to our own existence.

I have some idea of what it means to love God, and to love my neighbor, but what does it mean to authentically love one’s own self?

I think the key is entrusting, actively entrusting oneself to God. I think that is the key to truly loving another.

All love goes out and returns to its source: God. Whatever love we have finds its first and ultimate source in God. Flowing through us, its natural direction is towards God again.

So to love myself, I place myself in the place which is the source and end of love: the heart of God. I place myself there as a whole being; I give myself to him; I entrust myself to his keeping. From then on, gazing on myself I cannot help but see myself in the context of the Beauty and Love of God. Thus, I do not love myself for my own sake, because my gaze becomes transfixed on the one who holds me.

Likewise with others: If I entrust them to Jesus, insofar as it is for me to do so, I cannot help but see them in the context of the Beauty and Love of Christ. They do not lose their identity, nor I mine – no, rather than being obscured by the light of his Beauty, we are illuminated by it. Not only does it shine upon us, revealing the surface, but so intense is this light that it shines through us, and we become illuminated throughout the whole of our being.

For the full completion of this, we shall have to wait until we are raised to live, but raised incorruptible, even glorified.

Hasten the day, Lord Jesus.

Come Holy Spirit, begin your work in my heart today.

Father, glorify your name.

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