Looking for love.
In the right place.
Reading a meditation from Catherine of Siena, I was impressed by how real love is actually the opposite of sin, and how looking for love in all of the wrong places, or ‘making love’ in all the wrong ways, deadens the spiritual capacity for not only recognizing true love, but accepting that we are loved - that we were created by love, in love, and for love.
I’ll try and rewrite Catherine’s meditation in the manner I understood it here. How often we try to convey something we understood spiritually and in doing so, we trivialize it? But I will attempt it anyway.
So, if Catherine wrote it as I understood what she wrote…
“Love God, not for your own sake; the pleasure and satisfaction, or for your own profit; your security and superiority - but love him because he is Love itself, and because he is worthy of all love and of being loved, and therefore deserves all of your love.
Then your love will be perfect and not mercenary - no longer content with sensible gratification. You will thereby be inebriated with love, unable to think of anything save Christ crucified and the delicious wine flowing from his sacred side - that is the perfect love, the highest charity which you see God has gifted you - before the creation of the world. That is love. (It is a love so enraptured, that sacrifice and suffering is no longer distinguishable from consolation.)
That God first loved us.
This is the love God has shown and given you before the creation of the world. He was in love with you before you even came to be. O! My! God! He was in love with you even before you came to be! If he had not so fallen in love with you - he would never have created you.
But because of the love he had for you - as he saw you within himself, he was moved to grant you being.
How your thought, your mind, your heart, and your soul will be expanded when you drink this sweet charity, this everlasting and authentic love. And you will never be satiated.” - Adapted from St. Catherine of Siena
(After writing it out, I don’t think I expressed it well at all.)
July 6th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Dear Catherine,You know that I have always been able to count on you, and Padre Pio. I really need your intersession. You know what it’s about too. My Katie Siena is a brat.She is self centered, lazy, unkind,and uncaring ,defiant ,hateful and most disrespectful. How can this be when the others are not?I thought that people who are slow are supposed to be sweet?
The intersessions of Fr.Flannagan have done their part, but now what? Just because your slow doesn’t mean that you don’t have to choose God too.Mom can’t choose God for you. I would be eternally crushed if any one of my children went to hell,and yet she seems hell bent.Sometimes I don’t know how to parent her.Worse yet I think that I have screwed up ,and from the begining. Please help us… I am going to go cry now. A lot…Then I will eat icecream for lunch, not after ,but instead of.
Don’t even think of praying for me, pray for my kid.
July 6th, 2008 at 11:07 am
How does one paraphrase a Saint anyway, it did hit the spot. On another note, I think we should pray for her, first, and then the kid. Chuck the ice cream, grab the beads.
July 6th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Everybody who has ever criticized blogs and bloggers should be required to read Terry’s post and that Mom’s cry for help.
I’ll be praying for her and her daughter.
July 6th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Terry, your meditation from St. Catherine is lovely.
Belinda, prayers for Katie and you.
July 6th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Yikes, I am not sucidal, I am just having a bad day (um summer) with a self absorbed, disobediant, hateful, disabled teen.There have been many bad days ,and will be again in the future.I wallor in self pity for half an afternoon then tire of it. I kick myself in the ass, and begin to do what God calls me to do.The issue is that my daughter is retarded ,and she is having a tough time finding her place in this world. She is too smart for the short people bus ,but she is WAY too slow for regular school. What I am really bummed about is how to meet her needs, and how in the hell is she gonna get thru Catholic high school? Lord? The Catholic school is going to change the whole curriculum for HER. She wont apreciate it. Catholics have been WONDERFUL to us .I LOVE Cathoics. She doesn’t understand words.Public high school is no option, they will crucify her. Side note here. She was born 2 months premature at 2lb 14oz and her intestines blew a hole, she had surgery ,then they blew another hole. I think that she sustained some brain damage from the 5 surgeries that she has had.(Her twin sister Grace wants to be a nun and is dressing like one at home,and now in public, but no veil in public.A lacy one at Mass, her sisters are horrified.)I am the one that holds my Katie accountable ,and she hates me. She tells me to shut up. Disability or not we have jobs to do, and a God to please. I say get on it! Now tell me would you give a teen that doesn’t do the right thing when no one is looking a drivers license? A credit card? Any personal freedom. It is because of this child that I have learned about the communion of Saints ,and that they are my brothers ,and sisters that long to help us.I wouldn’t have babbled so, but I love St.Catherine ,and I need her assistance.You are all so kind ,I am embarrassed, God bless you all. Terry I love your religious posts especially “Blood of Christ inebriate me” I apologize profusely for rambling… My tombstone is gonna read “Do the right thing even when no one else is looking”