Justifying the Heart
October 5, 2010
(St. Maria Faustina)Dear Family of Mary!Dear children; Today I call you to a humble, my children, humble devotion. Your hearts need to be just. May your crosses be your means in the battle against the sins of the present time. May your weapon be patience and boundless love - a love that knows to wait and which will make you capable of recognizing God's signs - that your life, by humble love, may show the truth to all those who seek it in the darkness of lies. My children, my apostles, help me to open the paths to my Son. Once again I call you to pray for your shepherds. Alongside them, I will triumph. Thank you. We talked yesterday about being humble, and that humility comes from a childlike relationship with Jesus. Being near Jesus, close and safe with Him, infuses us with humility because we know that we are His. But Mother Mary continues, saying, "Your hearts need to be just." Justice is another word that can send chills down our spines! We know that on our own we cannot achieve justice. Justice implies that we live the law perfectly. Justice says that we do everything that is expected of us. But we know that it is impossible for us to fulfill the law. We always fall short somewhere. So what can Our Mother mean? As I reflected, it occurred to me that Mother Mary is not talking about our lives here, she is talking about our hearts. Our hearts need to be just. As I thought further, I remembered hearing a carpenter once talk about "justifying" the corners of something he was building. I looked up the word justify in the dictionary and found that one of its meanings is "to square something." And to square something means to make it correspond or agree. A building is squared if the corners are at right angles and everything lines up! Well, to justify our hearts, to make them just, might mean something like this. To justify one's heart might be to square it with the Lord's heart. One might examine one's heart to find out if everything inside is in agreement with God's heart. To see if one's heart is square with God! So a just heart could be one that has been squared with God's heart, corrected to be like God's heart in all its dimensions. I like this idea of a just heart. We can examine our feeling and desires and compare them to those of Jesus. Do they square up? We can look at our values. Are they like Our Lord's? How about our memories? Are they corrected to match the memories that Jesus has of the same event? Do we need to see things more like He sees them? What or who do we love the most? Can we square our loves with those of Jesus? How much is our heart like His? To justify our hearts with Jesus' heart is a joyful act of love. His Heart is pure, blessed, full of peace and forgiveness, open and accepting, and sacrificial. He is love itself. So if our hearts can be justified, lined up with His, we will find all these blessings ourselves. It occurs to me that we cannot make our hearts like Jesus' heart. But we can surrender our hearts to Him, so that He can make them like His. Once we have examined them, we can surrender them to Him. Then He will justify them, in both meanings of the word! He will clean them out, purify them with His forgiveness, and then make them line up with His Heart! What a gift! What a joy! On this, her feast day, let's listen to St. Faustina as she shares about her heart and Jesus' heart."Jesus, my Love, today gave me to understand how much He loves me, although there is such an enormous gap between us, the Creator and the creature; and yet, in a way, there is something like equality: love fills up the gap. He Himself descends to me and makes me capable of communing with Him. I immerse myself in Him, losing myself as it were; and yet, under His loving gaze, my soul gains strength and power and an awareness that it loves and is especially loved. It knows that the Mighty One protects it. Such prayer, though short, benefits the soul greatly, and whole hours of ordinary prayer do not give the soul that light which is given by a brief moment of this higher form of prayer." (815 Diary) Well, I guess a just heart is one that is filled with Jesus' love, filled to the brim! Thank you, Mother, for drawing us into the love of your Son. Thank you!In Jesus and Mary!
Cathy Nolan
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