Dear Friends of Francisco,
Greetings peace and Blessings to you and your families and friends from Toronto. I hope and pray ya’ll are deeply engaged in this favorable time for learnin how to get and stay close to Jesus. As I mentioned from B16 in last weeks message, Lent is a favorable time to learn to stay close to him who on the cross consummated for all mankind the sacrifice of his life. St Augustine, a great “perseverer” in the ever expanding blessings and all consuming demands of the way of love confesses with great passion the awesomeness of learning and striving to cling and “stay close”. He prays in book 10 chapter 28 of his confessions, “When I shall cleave to you with all my being, no more will there be pain and toil for me. My life will be life indeed, filled wholly with you.”
This cleaving – the learning to stay close – that Augustine experienced and is talkin about arises out of and is sustained by the communion of love overflowing from the abyss of the Father’s Love for humanity. It’s like what Jesus makes available for us in John 14:21 when he challenges us to peruse love proposing the prospect of communion with the promise of a passionate manifestation of his presence: “He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” As the great JP pointed out (and I believe experienced himself), It is a journey totally sustained by grace, which nonetheless demands an intense spiritual commitment and is no stranger to painful purifications (the "dark night"). But it leads, in various possible ways, to the ineffable joy experienced by the mystics as "nuptial union".
I pray that JP pray for us to learn how to get and stay close to love with an ever greater passionate pursuit of love each day; that we will be energized by greater encounters of receiving and giving love that will sustain us in intensifying our spiritual commitment to learning to get and stay close so that the perfect Love that casts out fear will shelter us overcome fear of the painful purification necessary for the fulfillment of perfect love in our lives a little more each day. Peace and Blessings to you and all your families and friends and Lord willing talk to ya’ll next week…4 ever in Jesus and Mary…
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