01/12/2025

Monday Week 1 of Advent

Yesterday my total conviction, at long last, that all prayer, awareness and thinking about God should, if it is to accept the guidance of SON, Jesus of Nazareth, become the child-like loving trust that he displayed in his "Daddy".

I have often struggled with how to "love" God with my human heart. For decades of my life I have listened to Paul "Faith, Hope but above all Charity" but there has never been that jump, the skip of joy in my heart, that is characteristic of my human love when I try to raise my mind and heart to "Our Father".

The stark command "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart and mind" has never been absent from my awareness of being but has never inspired the certainty that is the  warmth of the affection that is my response when meeting family, friends and especially dogs.

IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT creates out of LOVE. Each creature, molecule, atom, particle of matter is a product of his LOVE. It is the boundless Joy which is his whole being.

I think that the whole point of his Incarnation is for us to be able to accept that we can do no more with our lives than respond to his Joy in Being, i.e. our lives, His Creation with the same Joy that is his Love living in our hearts. 

We must not go after things that are too great. St Francis knew that our "sentimental" love of the babe in the crib was a reflection of the vastness beyond all understanding of  IAMFTHERSONHOLYSPIRIT and that our love of inferior creatures, animals,  was indirect love of their creator.

As I join the Church in preparation for the Nativity of Our Lord I hope that I can become  satisfied that there is nothing "mere" about the sentimentality of my love and joy at Christmastide, and  that it is the same LOVE with which we love our earthly fathers, families and friends that God, the source of all Good, requires us to return to him for that is the limit of our human nature we can do no more than be true to our humanity.

My own dad often used to say "The more I think of human nature the more I love my dog" I don't know whom he was quoting but I do know what he meant.