A Quote by Margaret Mary Alacoque
It is attachment to creatures and to self-satisfaction that weakens the blessings of love in your heart. You must die to all that, if you wish the pure love of God to reign therein.
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When attachment arises in the place of love, it sees the other as separate; it grasps and needs. Attachment is conditional; it seeks control and it fear loss. Ask your heart if attachment has replaced love. If we speak to our heart, it will always tell us the truth.
The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, “I will love this person because I need them.” Or, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.” This isn’t love at all - it is attachment - and attachment is rigid, it is very different from love.
Try not to confuse attachment with love. Attachment is about fear and dependency, and has more to do with love of self than love of another. Love without attachment is the purest love because it isn't about what others can give you because your empty. It is about what you can give others because you're already full.
Whatever a man loves he inevitably clings to, and in order not to lose it he rejects everything that keeps him from it. So he who loves God cultivates pure prayer, driving out every passion that keeps him from it. He who drives out self-love, the mother of the passions, will with God's help easily rid himself of the rest, such as anger, irritation, rancor and so on. But he who is dominated by self-love is overpowered by the other passions, even against his will. Self-love is the passion of attachment to the body.
To find God, you must look with all your heart. To remain present to God, you must remain present to your heart. To hear his voice, you must listen with all your heart. To love him, you must love with all your heart. You cannot be the person God meant you to be, and you cannot live the life he meant you to live, unless you live from the heart.
I will be led and taught of the Holy Spirit. God desires full development, use and activity of our faculties. The Holy Spirit can and will guide me in direct proportion to the time and effort I will expend to know and do the will of God. I must read the Bible to know God's will. At every point I will obey and do I will die to self. I will begin to ask God to put me in a service of constant circumstances where to live Christ I must die to self. I will be alive unto God. That I may learn to love Him with my heart, mind, soul, and body.
When Patanjali says "non-attachment", he is not anti-love. Really, he is for love. Non-attachment means be natural, loving, flowing, but don't get obsessed and addicted. Addiction is the problem. Then it is like a disease. You cannot love anybody except your child - this is addiction. Then you will be in misery. Your child can die; then there is no possibility for your love to flow. Even if your child is not going to die, he will grow. And the more he grows, the more he will become independent. And then there will be pain. Every mother suffers, every father suffers.
Think not you are charitable if the love of Jesus and His brethren be not purely the motive of your gifts. Alas! you might not give your superfluities, but "bestow all your goods to feed the poor;" you might even "give your body to be burned" for them, and yet be utterly destitute of charity, if self-seeking, self-pleasing or self-ends guide you; and guide you they must, until the love of God be by the Holy Ghost shed abroad in your heart.
If you really wish to follow Christ, if you want your love for him to grow and last, then you must be faithful to prayer. It is the key to the vitality of your life in Christ. Without prayer, your faith and love will die. If you are constant in daily prayer and in the Sunday celebration of Mass, your love for Jesus will increase. And your heart will know deep joy and peace, such as the world could never give.
All you need is already within you, only you must approach your self with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for your self, all I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect. Deny yourself nothing -- glue your self infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them; you are beyond.
As the Holy Trinity, our God is One Being, although Three Persons, so, likewise, we ourselves must be one. As our God is indivisible, we also must be indivisible, as though we were one man, one mind, one will, one heart, one goodness, without the smallest admixture of malice - in a word, one pure love, as God is Love. That they may be one, even as We are One (John 17:22).
Love allows your beloved the freedom to be unlike you. Attachment asks for conformity to your needs and desires. Love imposes no demands. Attachment expresses an overwhelming demand - "Make me feel whole." Love expands beyond the limits of two people. Attachment tries to exclude everything but two people.
Must you continue to be your own cross? No matter which way God leads you, you change everything into bitterness by constantly brooding over everything. For the love of God, replace all this self-scrutiny with a pure and simple glance at God's goodness.
You are not called to believe in your love to God, but in God's love to you! Do not argue, 'I cannot love God! I have striven to my uttermost to do so, but have failed in all my endeavors, until in despair I have abandoned the thought and relinquished the attempt.' Be it so- no effort of your own can strike a spark of love to God from your heart. Nor does God demand the task at your hands. All that He requires of you is faith in His love, as embodied and expressed in Jesus Christ to poor sinners.
Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world.
The experience of not forgetting consciousness alone is the state of devotion which is the relationship of unfading real love, because the real knowledge of Self, which shines as the undivided supreme bliss itself, surges up as the nature of love. Love itself is the actual form of God. That is pure bliss. Call it pure bliss, God, Self, or what you will. That is devotion, that is realization and that is everything.
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