“Do whatever He tells you” – John 2:5 – the Path to Human Perfection
Beloved FRIENDS,
I wish to suggest to you, today, for the pleasure of your meditation and sanctification, the key to achieving human perfection and holiness. This key is the most essential and sure path to becoming the perfect soil, the good soil, that receives the seed of life, the word of God, nourishes it and allows for the growth of a healthy tree of virtue that yields good fruits of love, joy, justice, and peace. This precious key is the virtue of Obedience to the Will of God.
In order to do justice to this most precious key of Obedience in speaking about it, let me borrow the words of our very dear Mother, the Most honored Lady and glorious Queen of Mountain Carmel, the Woman Most Blessed. Her beautiful words, the last time out seven, she speaks in Scripture, are like a garden of Lilies, “Do whatever He tells you,” – John 2:5. What a powerful invitation that bears the precious key to the treasure of human sanctification and holiness, “Do whatever He tells you!” In other words, the Queen of heaven invites us “to place our human wills totally and completely in the hands of Divine Will.” That is the only way we can attain human perfection and holiness. Devotion to our Lady makes us obedient to her son. The more we love her, the more she directs us to her son. We need not think of this virtue of obedience to God’s will as something very distant or something impossible, the life of Christ exemplifies this virtue. Christ is the perfect human because his human will is perfectly tied in to the Will of God. And the more we love our Lady, the easier it is to imitate Christ’s obedience to God’s Will, the more we grow in holiness and the more we become the good soil.
However, the virtue of obedience to God’s will has a twin sister. It is the virtue of humility. Where there is humility, there is always obedience. And the mother of these two is the virtue of faith, which is the trust and confidence we have in God. In the “Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin,” our Lord speaks to St. Catherine of Sienna about those who wish to attain the virtue of Obedience to God’s will, thus,
“By the light of most holy faith, for by this light they will know that they must slay their selfish will with the knife of contempt for every selfish sensual passion and espouse the bride, love will give to them, the bride I speak of is, true and ready obedience with her sister humility with patience. Without humility, obedience would die.” - Dialogue 159
Obedience is easy were love reigns supreme. These days I have plunged my mind into the life of the Little Flower of Carmel from whom I have drawn great lessons. Once she wrote, “God has made me so that when once I love, I love forever.” And let me say that this applies to all of us here. We were made for a single purpose, to be love. And the more we are obedient to love, the more we discover ourselves.
This, my dear friends, is the key to true happiness that I wish to suggest to you, today. May those ever sweet and most gentle words of our Blessed Mother, “Do whatever he tells you,” be the flame to ignite a true love of obedience in our hearts. Let us heed the words of the apostle Paul to the Romans, “Brethren: …for as you yielded your members as slaves of uncleanness and iniquity unto iniquity, so now yield your members as slaves of justice unto sanctification”- Rom. 6:19. And, like the only remaining piece to finish a beautiful mosaic, let us fix our human will with the Divine will, let us gladly offer our lives to God, the divine architect, so that He can shape us into the perfect human, perfect and good soil that gives rise to new life of holiness in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
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