CHAPTER SEVEN
(Excerpt)
RELIGIOUS LIFE
Who will be able to understand Love, to the point of falling in love with Love, of being the victim of Love? The great wish of my appeal?
Who will be able to understand the divine measure of Love, to the point of rendering back a love without measure?
Who, if not just the one who knows how to lose his or her egoism, imposing silence upon it in order to hear the lessons of love's Master.
For only from Love can you learn love, as it is from Love alone that you draw love.
And to really understand Love, aren't both these things necessary: to learn Love from my Heart and to take Love from my Heart?
Taking Love from Me in order to take It from yourself, by letting yourself be taken by Me. A mutual, unifying appropriation of each other that prayer is made of!
Yes, believe in Love and you will understand Love!
Listen to Love and you will understand Love!
Pray to Love and you will understand Love!
Who will understand the Extent of Love? The extent of eternity?
The one who will truly believe that this eternity is Perpetual Charity without end! In caritate perpetua dilexi.
The one who will unfailingly believe that this perpetuity is the activity of union in unceasing actuality. I am with you always to the close of the age.
Yes, my eternal always is a continual now, a perpetual present of love in tireless action! And therefore a continuous outpouring of graces:
Always greater diffusion for always closer communion.
If it is really true then that my Heart loves you since always and for always, without beginning or end, what is my Love if not a today at every instant?
And in return what must your love be if not a succession of acts so uninterrupted as to be permanent.
Permanence of belief and of trust in my Love.
Permanence of response and oblation to my Love.
Here then is the profession that my Heart awaits from each heartbeat of yours: Right now, right this very moment, I know, I believe that You are loving me, that your Love fills me with gifts, that It wants me all for Itself!
Right now, right this very moment, You know, You see that I love You, O my Savior, that my heart in all fullness gives itself to You, that it calls You and appeals to You filled with trust.
With each breath of your life, confide to your heavenly Mother the sweet mission of renewing on your behalf this profession of active love in all its actuality, a response to the eternal extent of my infinite Charity that so pleases my Heart.
You too, renew this profession as often as possible: Et nunc! Et semper! diligo, trado, confido, echo of In caritate perpetua. (Now! Always! I love, I surrender, I trust, echo of An everlasting love.
Your life will thus be for Me an unbroken succession of praises, a perpetual Gloria
