Oct. 26, 2010 Tuesday: What Jesus is Like

The following is an excerpt from the book "What Jesus Is Like" written by a mystic Venerable Concepcion Cabrera de Armida (d. 1937). She was a wife, mother, foundress, and a lay apostle whose cause for beatification is under way.

Chapter 9: His Love for Souls

"As the Father loves Me, so I also I have loved you" (cf. Jn 15:9)

How does Jesus love us? He loves us with the same love with which He loves His heavenly Father: that is, with the Holy Spirit. He could never have dreamt that we might be loved in this manner, the way Jesus loves us, participating in the very love with which Jesus loves the Father. Who would be able to comprehend this?
   In this love with which Jesus loves us is the very Love in which the thrice holy God burns. It is an efficacious, fruitful love. An unquenchable Fount of blessings. He pours forth this love into us with incomprehensible generosity. A love solely conceived and perpetuated by God Himself.
   We want a love, ever ancient, from before we existed. We want to taste and feel the words of Isaiah 54:8, "I have loved you with an everlasting love." There has never been a single instant when we have not been loved by that love.

   The love of Jesus is superior to the wildest dreams or desires of our souls because, besides being inexhaustible, it is unique and it possesses at the same time all of the loves that have ever existed. In the Heart of Jesus we find the tender love of a mother, the generous love of a father, the sweet love of a spouse, the intimate love of a friend and a great deal more that we cannot begin to find the human words to explain.
   This mysterious love is unique not only because it excludes the frailty of other loves while containing all their beauty, but it is also unique because it adapts perfectly to each soul and assumes in each one, as it were, that soul's form.
   And if we wish, we can fully enjoy that unending and rich love without fear of losing it. To the degree that we can penetrate into this love of Jesus--into that ocean of love--the greater assurance we will have that we shall never leave its scope. "Who can separate me from the love of Christ?" (cf. Rm 8:35).
   For our part, the love which the Holy Spirit diffuses in our hearts is of itself permanent, because it is Life. Of course, we can lose this Love by our sins, but only if we want to. Anyway, who, having known Jesus, would want to offend Him?
   Whoever loves Jesus in spirit and in truth thinks that he or she will always love Him. It is only this kind of love that attains the ideal Love--the ultimate desire of all love. It is Love itself that is the greatest reward of true love.
   Also, the human heart expands in the ocean of Infinite Love: a love that is infinite, ever new, deep as the ocean, immense as the heavens! Who would ever imagine that we might be the object of that profoundly intense love of Jesus? His love is an infinite gift: the fullness of all goodness, perfection and beauty.