Love Crosses, Not With an Emotional Love, but With Rational and Supernatural Love - Saint Louis De Montfort

Love Crosses, Not With an Emotional Love, but With Rational and Supernatural Love - Saint Louis De Montfort

God does not ask you to love the Cross with the will of the flesh. Since the flesh is the subject of evil and corruption, all that proceeds from it is evil and it cannot, of itself, submit to the will of God and His crucifying law. It was this aspect of His human nature which Our Lord referred to when He cried out in the Garden of Olives, “Father, . . . not My will but Thine be done” (Luke 22:42). If the lower powers of Our Lord’s human nature, though holy, could not love the Cross without interruption, then, with still greater reason will our human nature, which is very much vitiated, repel it. At times, like many of the saints, we too may experience a feeling of even sensible joy in our sufferings, but that joy does not come from the flesh though it is in the flesh. It flows from our superior powers, so completely filled with the divine joy of the Holy Ghost, that it spreads to our lower powers. Thus a person who is undergoing the most unbearable torture is able to say, “My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God” (Ps. 83:3).