How to Live the Great Virtue – Love of God
Reminder: the aim of life is to be perfected in love, but as the mystic says:
“Love is a direction, not a state of the soul.”
The idea of perfection in these maxims is that perfection is the indication of a process and not a state to be arrived at. The “perfect” human is the one who is always mindful of a journey toward greater union with the Divine, the Source of All Being, the Fullness of Life. It is the process of becoming fully human.
- We arrive at the fullness of being human by recognizing and acknowledging our sins and bad habits. To generously overcome bad habits and sinful ways we practice their opposites. Free yourself of the least faulty and willful imperfection. Avoid every occasion which you know will lead you to reinforce a bad habit or place you on a sinful path.
- Until our hearts are fully purified (given to the process of growing in union with the Great Love), we will not be ready to receive the great communications of grace that God wishes to lavish on us.
- Free yourself from every affection on earth, that is, let no created thing or person be more important than the path of Great Love.
- Have a heart that no created being holds back! Have a heart empty of all that is less than fully human and full of God.
- Work then at tempering all your passions; keep struggling with them until you have completely subjected them to the guidance of reason and the enlightenment of grace.
- Know yourself so that you can put aside your old self and put on the new one. In order to live this perfection, let go of every egotistical movement of the heart which originates in a wounded nature rebellious to the grace of the Holy Spirit.
- Having turned away and let go of this rebellious drive, live the life of Christ Jesus putting on his humility, his gentleness, his simplicity and his other virtues so that with St. Paul you may exclaim, “I live; no, it is no longer I who live; it is Christ Jesus who lives in me.”
- By this transformed life in Christ Jesus, love what the world hates; hate what the world loves; let the world be crucified to you and you crucified to it. That is, allow the suffering of this world so affect you that you, like Christ Jesus, suffer with it.
- Empty yourself completely of the spirit of the world and be filled with Christ Jesus and with the fullness of his Holy Spirit. More specifically, in order to live more fully the life of the Savior Jesus: be, at least in desire, the poorest person, the most gentle and kind, the humblest, the most persevering; in a word, the most perfect in the practice of every virtue of which he has left us the example in his holy life and, in a special way, in his death.
- Living, we live as did Jesus – completely open to the human condition and living compassion with it. Let your heart break when other hearts break. Suffer with creation: this is the life of the poorest, the most gentle and kind, the humblest and most persevering – and the most human life we can live. It is the life of the Savior Jesus.
- Living and dying in him, with him and through him, make your own, furthermore, the holy intentions of the Savior Jesus; that is, live so that God’s desire for creation’s wholeness and fulfillment will be the sole reason for your life.
- Thus, your whole life will be given to cooperation with the Source of All Being, the Creator, and you will be partner with God in the Great Love which saves and perfects all of creation.
- Live in the same spirit of the Savior Jesus; that is, live a life hidden in God, a life that needs no other acknowledgment than the conviction that one is living the Great Love. This is a life without braggadocio and without self-aggrandizement.
- In this way we are better able to reverence God in all things and love God in all things. In this way we draw from creation around us the spirit of the Great Love and are more reality led by grace into the imitation of Jesus who is our way, our truth, and our life.
Daily excerpts and reflections by Marcia Allen, CSJ on the Maxims of Perfection by Jean-Pierre Medaille