Oct 26 Sat
How can I love God more?
Contemplating Christ's sacred Humanity is the best way to love God.
St. Josemaría told us: “Whenever I pray... I like to look this way at the life of Christ our Lord: his birth in a stable, his growing up like all other children, his thirty years of hidden life, his Death on a Cross for all mankind. I contemplate him like this because I want to learn from him; and to learn from him, the best I can do is to get to know his life. I want to reproduce Christ's life in you, God's children, by helping you read the Gospel and meditate on it. Thanks to prayer, we have Jesus' entire life in our head, like a beautiful full-color film that we can run whenever we want."
Christ's love for us requires our generous response: love is repaid with love. And to love him, we need to get to know him, contemplate his sacred Humanity, becoming very familiar with every detail of his life on earth. St. Josemaría said: “Talk with him in the word, in prayer, in a constant dialogue filled with words of affection and love: reading his life, following closely in his footsteps, being another character in the Gospel scenes. He became man to make it easier for us to talk with him. Don't you like sharing confidences with old friends? I certainly do. Well, that is what Christ does with us. Do you see now why I want you to love our Lord's sacred Humanity? So that you can go to him more trustingly. Often, I close my eyes because - let me repeat - I like to contemplate Christ's sacred Humanity as in a film, for I love him with all my soul."
We can respond to Christ's love by often praying about his sacred Humanity. We can bring to our prayer a gesture of his that moves our heart, his dedication to the Apostles, his continual self-giving. We enlist our imagination and memory, our mind and will, to live alongside Jesus,” seeing ourselves as one more participant in the scenes. The whole secret of holiness is to become like him, our model."
Among the many scenes from Christ's life, St. Josemaría taught us to meditate especially on the Passion, since it so clearly manifests the depth of God's love for us. “Do you want to accompany Jesus closely, very closely?... Open the holy Gospel and read the Passion of our Lord. But don't just read it: live it. There's a big difference. To read is to recall something that happened in the past; to live is to find oneself present at an event that is happening here and now, to be someone taking part in those scenes. Then, allow your heart to open wide; let it place itself next to our Lord. And when you notice it trying to slip away - when you see that you are a coward, like the others - ask forgiveness for your cowardice and mine."