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The first motive is expressed in the greatest commandment, which
knows no limits:
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'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole
heart and with thy whole soul and with all thy strength and with
all thy mind.' [75]
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This commandment requires the love of God for
His own sake, and not from self-interest or attachment to our own
personal satisfaction; it demands, moreover, that we love God with
all our strength in the hour of trial, so that we may finally
arrive at the stage of loving Him with our whole mind, when our
love will be unaffected by the ebb and flow of sensibility and we
shall be of those who
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'adore in spirit and in truth.'
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Furthermore,
this commandment is absolute and without limits: the end for which
all Christians are required to strive is the perfection of
charity, each in his own condition and state of life, whether it
be in the state of marriage or in the priestly or the religious
life.
St. Catherine of Siena emphasizes this in the 11th and 47th
chapters of her Dialogue, reminding us that we can only perfectly
fulfil the commandment of love towards God and our neighbour if we
have the spirit of the counsels, that is to say, the spirit of
detachment from earthly goods, which, in the words of St. Paul, we
must use as though we used them not.
The great motive of the second conversion is thus described in the
60th chapter:
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'Such souls should leave their mercenary love and
become sons, and serve Me irrespective of their own personal
advantage. I am the rewarder of every labour, and I render to
every man according to his condition and according to his works.
Wherefore, if these souls do not abandon the exercise of holy
prayer and their other good works, but continue with perseverance
to increase their virtues, they will arrive at the state of filial
love, because I respond to them with the same love with which they
love Me; so that if they love Me as a servant loves his master, I
pay them their wages according to their deserts, but I do not
reveal myself to them, because secrets are revealed to a friend
who has become one thing with his friend, and not to a servant....
' But if My servants, through displeasure at their imperfection
and through love of virtue, dig up with hatred the root of
spiritual self-love, and mount to the throne of conscience,
reasoning with themselves so as to quell the motions of servile
fear in their heart, and to correct mercenary love by the light of
holy faith, they will be so pleasing to Me that they will attain
to the love of the friend. And I will manifest Myself to them, as
My Truth said in these words- "He who loves me shall be one thing
with me and I with him, and I will manifest myself to him and we
will dwell together." [76]
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These last words refer to the knowledge
of Himself which God grants by a special inspiration. This is
contemplation, which proceeds from faith enlightened by the gifts,
from faith united with love; it is a knowledge which savours
mysteries and penetrates into their depths.
A second motive which should inspire the second conversion is the
price of the blood of the Saviour, which St. Peter failed to
realize before the Passion, in spite of the words:
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'This is my
blood which is shed for you,'
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which Christ pronounced at the Last
Supper. It was only after the Resurrection that he began to
comprehend this. We read in the Dialogue 1 on this subject.
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'My
creatures should see and know that I wish nothing but their good,
through the Blood of My only-begotten Son, in which they are
washed from their iniquities. By this Blood they are enabled to
know My truth, how in order to give them life I created them in My
image and likeness and re-created them to grace with the Blood of
My. Son, making them sons of adoption.'
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This is what St. Peter
understood after his sin and after the Passion of Christ; it was
only then that he appreciated the value of the Precious Blood
which had been shed for our salvation, the Blood of Redemption.
Here we have a glimpse of the greatness of Peter in his
humiliation; he is much greater here than he was on Thabor, for
here he has some understanding of his own poverty and of the
infinite goodness of the most High. When Jesus for the first time
foretold that he must go to Jerusalem to be crucified, Peter took
his Master aside and said to Him:
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'Lord, be it far from thee, this
shall not be unto thee!'
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In speaking thus he had, all
unconsciously, spoken against the whole economy of Redemption,
against the whole plan of Providence, against the very motive of
the Incarnation. And that is why Jesus answered him.
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'Get behind
me, Satan; thou savourest not the things that are of God but the
things that are of men.'
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But now, after his sin and after his
conversion, Peter in his humiliation has an understanding of the
Cross, and he sees something of the price of the Precious Blood.
And so we can understand why St. Catherine constantly speaks in
her Dialogue and in her Letters of the Blood which gives efficacy
to Baptism and to the other sacraments. At every Mass, when the
priest raises the Precious Blood high above the altar, our faith
in its redemptive power and virtue ought to become greater and
more intense.
A third motive which ought to inspire the second conversion is the
love of souls which need to be saved, a love which is inseparable
from the love of God, because it is at once the sign and the
effect of that love. This love of souls ought in every Christian
worthy of the name to become a zeal that inspires all the virtues.
In St. Catherine it led her to offer herself as a victim for the
salvation of sinners. In the last chapter but one of the Dialogue
we read
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' Thou didst ask Me to do mercy to the world... Thou didst
pray for the mystical body of Holy Church, that I would remove
darkness and persecution from it, at thine own desire punishing in
thy person the iniquities of certain of its ministers.... I have
also told thee that I wish to do mercy to the world, proving to
thee that mercy is My special attribute, for through the mercy and
the inestimable love which I had for man I sent into the world the
Word, My only-begotten Son....
' I also promised thee, and now again I promise thee, that through
the long endurance of My servants I will reform My Spouse.
Wherefore I invite thee to endure, Myself lamenting with thee over
the iniquities of some of My ministers.... And I have spoken to
thee also of the virtue of them that live like angels.... And now
I urge thee and My other servants to grief, for by your grief and
humble and continual prayer I will do mercy to the world.'
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The fruit of this second conversion, as in the case of Peter, is a
beginning of contemplation by a progressive understanding of the
great mystery of the Cross and the Redemption, a living
appreciation of the infinite value of the Blood which Christ shed
for us. This incipient contemplation is accompanied by a union
with God less dependent upon the fluctuations of sensibility, a
purer, a stronger, a more continuous union. Subsequently, if not
joy, at all events peace, takes up its dwelling in the soul even
in the midst of adversity. The soul becomes filled, no longer with
a merely abstract, theoretical and vague persuasion, but with a
concrete and living conviction, that in God's government all
things are ordained towards the manifestation of His goodness.
[77] At the end of the Dialogue God Himself declares this truth:[78]
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'Nothing has ever happened and nothing happens save by the
plan of My divine Providence. In all things that I permit, in all
things that I give you, in tribulations and in consolations,
temporal or spiritual, I do nothing save for your good, so that
you may be sanctified in Me and that My Truth be fulfilled in
you.' It is the same truth which St. Paul expresses in his epistle
to the Romans: 'To them that love God all things work together
unto good.'
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This is the conviction that was born in the soul of Peter and the
Apostles after their second conversion, and also in the souls of
the disciples of Emmaus when the risen Christ gave them a fuller
understanding of the mystery of the Cross:
He said to
them,
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'and slow of heart to believe in all things which the
prophets have spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these
things and so to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and
all the prophets he expounded to them in all the Scriptures the
things that were concerning him.' [79]
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They knew Him in the
breaking of bread.
What happened to these disciples on the way to Emmaus should
happen to us too, if we are faithful, on the way to eternity. If
for them and for the Apostles there had to be a second conversion,
still more is such a conversion necessary for us. And under the
influence of this new grace of God we too shall say:
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'Was not our
heart burning within us whilst he spoke in the way and opened to
us the Scriptures?'
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Theology, too, helps us to discover the
profound meaning of the Gospel. But the more theology progresses,
the more, in a sense, it has to conceal itself; it has to
disappear very much as St. John the Baptist disappears after
announcing the coming of our Lord. It helps us to discover the
deep significance of divine revelation contained in Scripture and
Tradition, and when it has rendered this service it should stand
aside. In order to restore our cathedrals, to set well-hewn stones
into their proper place it is necessary to erect a scaffolding;
but when once the stones have been replaced the scaffolding is
removed and the cathedral once more appears in all its beauty. In
a similar way theology helps us to demonstrate the solidity of the
foundations of the doctrinal edifice, the firmness of its
construction, the proportion of its parts; but when it has shown
us this, it effaces itself to make place for that supernatural
contemplation which proceeds from a faith enlightened by the gifts
of the Holy Spirit, from a faith that penetrates and savours the
truths of God, a faith that is united with love. [80]
And so it is with the question with which we are dealing, the
truly vital question of our interior life in God.
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