Love


It is in the Eucharist that He gives us the greatest proof of His love.

For nineteen centuries he has been with us night and day, like a father who is loath to leave His children, like a friend who finds his pleasure with his friends, like a devoted physician who constantly remains by the bed-side of his patients.


He is ever active, adoring, praising and glorifying His Father for us, thanking Him for all the benefits He continually bestows upon us, loving Him in our stead, offering Him His Own merits and satisfactions to atone for our sins, and ever asking new graces in our behalf: “Always living to make intercession for us.”


He never ceases to renew upon the altar the Sacrifice of Calvary; He does so thousands of times a day, wherever there is a priest to consecrate, and he does so out of love for us, in order to apply to each one of us the fruits of His Sacrifice. And not content with immolating Himself, He gives Himself whole and entire to every communicant, to impart to each His graces, His dispositions and His virtues. (The Spiritual Life, Adolphe Tanquerey, #1256)



The divine love of His Incarnation extends into the Eucharist.

The Eucharist continues the logic of divine love that prompted the Incarnation. The same love by which God became man and died on the Cross to save mankind is that by which He wills to remain on the altars and in the tabernacles of the world, sacramentally, pouring out His precious Blood and giving us His Body. (Eucharist, Feingold, 20)



Sacrificial love.

In the Eucharist, Christ gives to his bride the very act by which he poured out his life for her to cleanse and sanctify her by meriting the remission of sins. That sacrifice of infinite love is also the act most pleasing to the father that is conceivable.

However, the full extent of that love was revealed only in His suffering and death on the Cross offered for our redemption. And so, He left to His loved ones a perfect token of His love giving to us sacramentally the very act by which He died for our sins. This is the Eucharist. (Eucharist, Feingold, 7)



His wounded Sacred Heart must love regardless of our inconstancy.

Is He not therefore, deeply wounded by our want of love?  Is He not bitterly disappointed by our infidelity? Is He not sorely distressed by our inconstance?  But He still abides with us, feeding us daily, bearing with our fickleness and our thoughtlessness.  He is constant in His love for us despite our fitful changes.  He is “the same, yesterday today, and forever” (Heb 13:8)—ever kind, ever gracious, ever long-suffering, ever merciful. (Transforming Your Life Through the Eucharist, Kane, 11)


Our love of God governs the fullness of His Eucharistic life in our soul.

In virtue of Christ’s love for us, the worthiness of our reception of Him depends chiefly on our love of Him. Love is the one Grace which, facilitating freer conformity to the will of God, enlarges and quickens the soul and renders it more capable of the ever increasing fullness of the life of the Eucharistic Savior. (Transforming Your Life Through the Eucharist, Kane, 64)


The Eucharist is inseparable from our belief in God’s love and desire for union with us.

Every Christian looks up to the Eucharist as the miracle of an unspeakable, inconceivable love of God for us human beings, the love of God who desires to unite Himself to us in the closest possible manner.  In the thoughts and feelings of every Catholic the idea of a supernatural union with God is inseparable from belief in this mystery. (479)


For how could we account for this ineffable miracle of divine love in the Eucharist, if it were God’s intention to treat us merely as His servants, and if it were not His will to raise us above our nature and take us to His fatherly bosom?  Whence comes this heavenly, divine nourishment, and to what end is it directed, if we are not born to a supernatural , divine life? (The Mysteries of Christianity, Scheeben, 479)


Love draws the soul into its deepest center to find God.

Love has the effect of drawing the soul to the hidden center of itself, to the inward caverns where God himself hides. The indwelling of God in the soul takes on a new resonance of attraction when we realize that love allows us to yield ourselves to God’s presenfe residing within us. Saint John of the Cross writes strikingly that “the soul’s center is God” (Living Flame of Love, 1.12; Saint John of the Cross, Haggerty, 272)



In our tenacious love, we will know God’s incomprehensible love.

[T]he tenacity of love takes us inwardly over time to the wisdom of knowing the incomprehensible love of God. He is known by love precisely as One who is unknown in his infinite love. … “This thicket of God’s wisdom and knowledge is so deep and immense that no matter how much the soul knows, she can always enter it further; it is vast and its riches incomprehensible” (Spiritual Canticle, 36.10; Saint John of the Cross, Haggerty, 340)



Tenacity of love is necessary to grow in union; it pleases God.

Our encounter with God, in which we do not understand him even while longing for him in love, is a journey through a dense thicket of mystery. A refusal to halt in seeking God with love, despite his incomprehensibility, assumes great perseverance. It is this tenacious love that perhaps attracts God even more to the soul. (Saint John of the Cross, Haggerty, 340)



A circle of knowledge and love, begins and continues in God.

[D]ivine knowledge begins with the initiative of divine love for us and is accomplished if we accept the offering of his love. thus, we enter into a wonderful circle of knowledge and love. Love makes us see and seeing makes us love. (On Love, Joseph Ratzinger, 15)

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