1. Wonderful promises reveal themselves to me if I read the gospels carefully. I can never insist too much with myself that all these are guaranteed by Jesus Christ. "Am I," He asks in the Imitation, "am I like to a person who promises and does not fulfil?" Promises roll easily enough off the tongues of men who are ready to forget them if it serves their purpose. But every single word spoken by Our Lord is weighed nicely in the balance, its every application is measured, and the GodMan will never promise except what He is able and prepared to give.
In my prayer this morning He would have me make a selection of these promises. He invites me to kneel in spirit by His side as He prays and to feed my mind and heart on the solid sustaining food which His divine words never fail to provide.
St. John tells me that, when Our Lord was at the Last Supper, He promised that if anybody loved Him he would be loved by the heavenly Father, "and I will love him and will manifest Myself to him." My love of God is to be proved, not merely by protestations of love, not merely by words, but also and especially by doing the deeds of love. If on my side I give Him this proof, I have the astounding assurance from Him that He will love me, that His Father will love me. Here is a theme that is inexhaustible; here is a promise that is the despair of even the saints to sound to the depths; here is a fact that can be but very imperfectly appreciated, even after much prayer, even after divine grace has illuminated the mind and inflamed the will the fact, namely, that I, who am kneeling here in prayer, am personally dear to God, loved ardently by God.
This is no pious tale, no merely edifying assertion. It is a statement solemnly made by Jesus Christ, God's own divine Son. All I can do is kneel here and beg Him to penetrate my dull mind with His light so that little by little the truth may begin to dawn. The day a soul wakes up to the fact that it is personally dear to God marks a definite advance in its spiritual life.
But the promise does not end here. Divine love too must express itself in deeds, so Our Lord tells me that He "will manifest Himself" to the soul that loves. For many men, even Catholics, Jesus Christ occupies the role of a remote acquaintance whom they respect indeed, whom they confess to be God, to whom they render a minimum of service. But He is far from being what He ought to be in their daily lives, far from being "manifest" to them in all the fullness of what is implied by "GodmadeMan."
To the soul that loves, to the soul that advances in the ways' of prayer, light is given in which to discern that Jesus Christ stands in the very center of life. The world is important only insofar as its interests and activities contribute to the fulfillment of His designs. Round about Jesus Christ everything converges. His solutions of life's problems are the only solutions worth a moment's consideration. His standards of value are always correct; they must be always correct. He is a judge Who cannot err; a Friend incapable of disloyalty to those who will have Him; a Lover Whose love is true and ennobling and satisfying and lasting; in Him is courage found when the road seems too long; in Him is strength and the assurance of victory; in Him is life, divine life, the fullness of grace, which He eagerly pours, with lavish hand, into the soul that will seek to keep united with Him.
Jesus, how inadequate are human words as a medium to express what You are! How keenly one realizes that one is grappling vainly with language in trying to tell of Your promise to love the soul that loves and to manifest Yourself to it! It is much if I have begun even dimly to understand. You have me here, all alone with Yourself in prayer. Open my eyes, Lord, that I may see!