Today, as I walked beside You, I heard You, teaching me to find You inside, in that place where I rest on You. And I saw it as a work, but a work of love. I thought of Mother Teresa, who always rested in You, by resting in Your Mother’s arms: she said the Rosary, nonstop, through luncheons, through plane flights, through the streets of Calcutta. I thought of Our Lady, and St. Joseph, in the heat and idolatry of the Egyptian cities, in Nazareth, in Jerusalem. Our Lady at Calvary, I thought of her, always resting with You, even in distress. And I thought about how much lower I am than that, than any of Your saints. How can I face the Cross like she did? How can I embrace it with Christ, like she did? I am not of that delicate, yet strong constitution: the constitution of the Virgin, with a heart always with You and in submission to You, a heart always trusting, never wavering, even in the viscitudes and waves of this life.
Then I heard it, inside-like: “Call on the Right of Love”. The Lord God Himself has said He loves us, loves us. And that love, love itself places incredible obligations on the Lover. It is to will the good for the other, to always be there: and in the ineffable greatness of God, to raise us up far beyond what we can imagine or even begin to do ourselves.
“You have the right to call on Me, to ask with all confidence for Me to make you a saint: to make your heart like Mine, to give you grace beyond measure, to do all, to raise you up to your Father’s embrace: this, daughter, this is the Right of Love.”
So, filled with joy, I called on Him in His Own Name: my only confidence is His Love, and the obligations of it that He has bound Himself to: to be a saint, to be so on His strength, for I have less than none (I am a fickle creature); to be made worthy by His worthiness. To be afraid only of what He wishes me to fear.
And He does all this while never truncating our free will. It is a balance so delicate that only God could conceive it.
My heart was bursting! All my life, I have heard things like I’ve just spoken of: He loves us, we can do nothing, etc: but I was fingering a dark wall, never feeling the edges of the door. Today, suddenly, the door was opened from the inside, and light flooded my dark soul. The Right of Love; an Eternal Lover who has bound Himself time and time again to His creatures by Love; it is there, everywhere, for all to see, repeated and shown in a myriad of ways. It seems to me that it requires only a desire, a small, even clumsy, movement of the will to set all aside in order to find Him. Then, in His time, you find that He has been all around you, all along, like an eternal embrace.
How I love Him: yet my love means nothing without Him: and He has given Himself to me, to all of us, and within the Right of Love, to make us His beloved, His saints. The door in the wall is Christ; and the Right to Love is the willingness, the cords of obligation that makes Him a door for us.
He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
