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Archive for November, 2008

The Real Devotion

When we speak of devotion it does not mean of praying everyday to the statue or picture of your favorite saints or picture of Jesus itself, it also does not mean a processions, and very important is does not also mean hurting yourself just to clean your sin or have mercy to God. I’m sorry but all that are wrong doings. Devotion means self offering to God but not literal giving your body, it’s just surrendering our self to God and trust him whatever God wants us to be.

Devotion is the warmth of our love for God. The more we receive from God, the more devotion we experience. The more we express our devotion, the more it grows inside. The more devotion, the more it grows inside. The more devotion we have, the more we love God and the more open we are to receive more of God. It is a wonderful circle of loving openness.

What do we mean by devotion? Well, what is a devoted parent? This mother or father loves the child, keeps an eye on the child, cares for the child constantly, enjoys the child, wants the best for him or her, builds a life around the object of devotion is what we mean when we speak of devotion to God.

The devoted disciple loves the Lord and keeps an inner eye attentive to the Lord. The devoted disciple wants what God wants, cares for the people God cares for, designs his or her life around the Lord.

Since devotion has a warm emotional quality, it begs for expression. As we express our devotion to God, it grows. How we express it does not matter so much, but we cooperate with God in our heart when we do express it.

God is likely to take away the negative offerings of emotion and increase the beautiful ones, thus showing us the Lord’s devotion to the disciple. Offering becomes an exchange of inner gifts. Who would not be devoted to such a Lord?

When emotions are regularly offered to God, the next step is offering our thoughts as we are aware of them. With this offering, the fabric of our mental experience will begin to be molded by the loving Lord. Nothing will ever be the same: we will become devotion itself, moment to moment, and we will love God and rejoice in God. “A burning devotion to God discovers renewal and refreshment in him as at the touch of his hand.”

That is the purpose of devotion, which is its own reason for being. In the end, love is for love; devotion is just for devotion. Once tasted, we wouldn’t want for a moment to return to life without devotion and self-offering.

Remember God

We must remember God not only when we need him but always. As you’re reading the paragraph it will say that God gave us a heart to be close to him because in reality our heart is the only organ in our body that can feel love. We must always remember God when we are in temptation when we are happy we thank him. In short always remember God in all and in every situation.

Finally, we nourish our longing for God by remembering him as constantly as we possibly can. Birgitta hears God say that this is his intension for us: “I gave man a heart so that he might enclose in it me, his God…so that his delight might be in thinking of me.”

In the beginning, of course, we will remember God only sporadically, in the blank spots of our days. We can fill our environment with reminders – symbols, words, pictures, music – and we can pray for grace to recall the presence of God more and more often. Our remembering gradually grows into praying without ceasing, as Paul admonished the first Christians to practice.

Remembering God is a way of cherishing God, of dreaming about him, of wishing that we were totally present to him all the time. We remember what we love.

Every time we do remember God, we will likely be aware that for the just-past hour or half-day or whatever, we have forgotten God. We will alternate between remembering God and forgetting. Out of the sweetness of remembering and still knowing our forgetfulness, we will want God more. Our yearning is intensified – our prayer is being answered.

So with Gregory, “Fixing our eyes on those things which help us to see [God], we must ever keep alive in us the desire to see more and more. And so no limit can be set to our progress towards God.”

TO BEGIN WHERE ARE WE NOW?

In this paragraph you can see to your self what you have gone so far. We need to assess ourselves on the things that we did and think if it was worth to God, if is the will of God, was it all good? Then ask ourselves where we are now?

When we want to take a trip, we need to know not only where we want to go but also where we are starting. We have some idea of our goal in spiritual life and we know for sure we are not there yet. Where are we now?

We begin the journey well, however, if we first recall that our essential nature is the divine Image within. Then we do well to acknowledge our messy and difficult current situation. That is not so hard. We know that life is difficult, with many struggles and pains, and that we feel more or less separated from God and everybody, encased in a skin with firm and sometimes unwelcome limits. We are presented, because of our wounded nature, with monumental challenges. We will take up these challenges one at a time and they will be overcome in us. There is no other way through this maze of original woundedness than to walk through it. Yet we move toward the most glorious goal in all of human experience: God fully alive is us.

God longing for our love

God Deserves to be love more than anyone else. We don’t take him for granted we need to love him with all our heart and all our souls because he loves us more than we did that is why we need to learn to love him more, he deserves to be loved more.

Even though our heart longs for God, it seems almost audacious to think that God wants us just as much, or even more, than we yearn for him. God is the initiator, always, of our longing. But more, Bernard tell us that

God is the cause of loving God…He himself creates the longing. He himself fulfills the desire. He himself causes himself to be such that he should be loved. He hopes to be so happily loved that no one will him in vain. His love both prepares and rewards ours. Kindly, he leads the way. He repays us justly. He is our sweet hope. He is riches to all who call upon him. There is nothing better than himself…He gives himself.

That has been a great wonder for all lovers of God. They have consistently asserted its truth. Because of God’s compassion – of what God is – he comes to us. He comes to us faster than we ever wish to come to him. It is said that for every single step we take toward God, he takes a dozen toward us. It’s a fact that never stops astounding us.