Second Sunday after Easter

Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk 
19th April 2015

You must serve Jesus in some way or other; else you would not save your soul. You are absolutely dependent upon Him. You cannot do without His Faith, His Life, His Death, His Blood, His Church, His Sacraments. You cannot take a step toward Heaven but by Him. Nothing that you think or do or say is worth anything until His worth has touched it. Dependence cannot be conceived more utter and absolute nor more incessant and indispensable than is your dependence upon Him. The question is simply then, is it not best to serve Him out of love. But has your religion until now been a service of Love? Or have you doled out our duties to Him, as a poor man pays a debt to a rich creditor? Has not the problem been to find out the least which you must do to gain Heaven? Weighing Commandments, clipping precepts, interpreting rules, seeking dispensations - is not this the kind of thing you have called your religion?

Have you been happy in your religion? Far from it. It has been a simple burden on you. If it had not been for Heaven and Hell, you would have made short work of it long since. But Heaven and Hell are facts.

I am for a happy religion. I see no use in an unhappy one, if God gives me my choice. But He has done more than that. He wished me to be happy in my religion. Nay, He wishes my religion to be the happiness and sunshine of my life. Now a happy religion means a religion of love. Everything comes easy to love. Thus, I am dependent for my happiness on no one but Jesus. My religion makes me happy all the day long. If serving Jesus out of love were some difficult thing, like the contemplation of the Saints or their austerities, then it would be another matter. But the fact is, it is nothing of the kind. To serve God because you are afraid of going to Hell, and wish to go to Heaven, is a great blessing and a supernatural work; but it is very difficult. Whereas, to serve God because you love Him is so easy that it is hard to account for so many men in the world neglecting to do it. Stupid souls, so miraculously blind!

And what is a further blessing is that what makes you happy makes our dearest Lord happy also; and the thought of this again makes us so happy that we can hardly contain ourselves, and then that again makes Him happier still. And thus religion gets sweeter and sweeter. Life is one long joy, because the Will of God is always being done in it, and the glory of God always being got from it. You become identified with the interests of Jesus; you wed them as if they were your own, and indeed they are. His Spirit steals into you, and sets up a little throne in your heart, and crowns itself, and then most sweetly proclaims itself king. It gained the crown by a dear conspiracy; you never suspected what divine love was about all the while. But so it is. God's glory becomes dear to you; you get quite touchy about Our Lord, for He has become the apple of your eye; and you are drawn to save souls, because it is what He is always doing, and so you get an instinct and a taste for it yourself. And so it all goes on; and so you live; and so you die. You never suspect you are a saint, or anything approaching one. Your life is hid with Christ in God, and hid from no one more than from yourself. You are a saint indeed!