Loving God with all my heart and seeing him in every person. If you are new to mental prayer, we invite you to visit our page on the ways of mental prayer, Don’t know how to pray to God, to learn more.
We begin Day 20 of our Lenten Challenge with this opening prayer:
TRUST AND BELIEVE...
Jesus,
I desire the virtue of loving God with all my heart. I want to be able to see You in every person. By increasing my love for You, I know that your grace will give me the ability to love people for your sake, even when it is difficult to do this. Please Lord, grant me this grace so that I may grow in holiness and be more pleasing to you.
AMEN.
Friday of the 3rd Week of Lent (Liturgical Year II)
Loving God with All My Heart and Seeing Him in Every Person
A Reflection for Prayerful Meditation
Join me in a prayerful reflection and meditation for your Lenten journey with Christ to Jerusalem.
Loving God with All My Heart in Every Person
Prayer to the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit,
I believe you are truly here and present to me right now. I desire to be present to you. Help me increase my love for you. The virtue of having holy love for others can only come when we ask you for it. I know that on my own I can only produce a disordered love that bears bad fruit.
Holy Spirit, you are the spiration of love between the Father and Son that dwells in my heart and speaks to my conscience. Please give me the desire to obey your inspirations. Take away my selfish desires and replace them with the fire of holy love.
Give me the grace worship you with a pure heart and without distraction. Help me to separate myself from all worldly attachments and spend these 15 minutes on loving God with all my heart and seeing him in every person.
Thank you for every consolation, desolation, time of silence, difficult trial, and temptation of the evil one. I understand that everything that happens in my life is by your holy will, whether it be your divine providence or your permissive will due to my sin and negligence.
Please humble me as I walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem. Help me spend today loving God with all my heart and loving every person you I encounter.
AMEN.
Say Nothing Just Take Him In
Spend 1-3 minutes in silence gazing at the Lord with love and gratitude, in a prayer of silent contemplation.
Make a Movie in Your Mind...
Now we will contemplate the first reading. Slowly imagine this scene in your mind as you read. Take your time. Pause over a moment that really tugs at your heart. Reread the passage again, this time imagine yourself physically there in the scene. What do you hear? See? Feel? Sense?
Loving God with All My Heart in Every Person
Straight are the Paths of the Lord
Hosea 14:2-10
Thus says the LORD: Return, O Israel, to the LORD, your God; you have collapsed through your guilt. Take with you words, and return to the LORD; Say to him, “Forgive all iniquity, and receive what is good, that we may render as offerings the bullocks from our stalls.
Assyria will not save us, nor shall we have horses to mount; We shall say no more, ‘Our god,’ to the work of our hands; for in you the orphan finds compassion.”
I will heal their defection, I will love them freely; for my wrath is turned away from them. I will be like the dew for Israel: he shall blossom like the lily; He shall strike root like the Lebanon cedar, and put forth his shoots. His splendor shall be like the olive tree and his fragrance like the Lebanon cedar.
Again they shall dwell in his shade and raise grain; They shall blossom like the vine, and his fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
Ephraim! What more has he to do with idols? I have humbled him, but I will prosper him. “I am like a verdant cypress tree”– Because of me you bear fruit! Let him who is wise understand these things; let him who is prudent know them. Straight are the paths of the LORD, in them the just walk, but sinners stumble in them.
Reflection:
Let us take a moment to reflect on the message in the first reading.
I want to start with a brief history of Hosea, to help you connect with him and better understand the meaning of this passage. This was a dark era in Israel’s ancient history when the Northern Kingdom declined and eventually fell in the 8th century BCE. Our prophet Hosea was commanded by God during his lifetime to marry a prostitute named Gomer who was an unfaithful wife to Hosea. Their marriage became a metaphor for God’s relationship with the faithless Israelites. Hosea’s marriage with an adulterous wife was a symbol for Israel’s spiritual idolatry.
What part of this excerpt from Hosea sticks out to you?
“I will heal their defection, I will love them freely; for my wrath is turned away from them.”
Hosea’s continued love and eventual redemption of Gomer, by purchasing her back from slavery in chapter 3 despite her infidelity, portrays God’s unwavering, forgiving love and commitment to reconciling with sinners who betray him and commit idolatry.
Now let’s personalize this passage from our first reading…
Do you have a sense of shame over past infidelity toward God? Take a few moments of silent prayer to contemplate how Gomer must have felt to be bought back from slavery by the one she betrayed. In that moment she must have realized how deeply loved she was.
What about you? Can you take a moment to close your eyes and accept how deeply loved you are?
Be Completely Real...
Ask the Lord to heal your defection. Name it. Affirm the truth that you are deeply loved by God and he desires to heal you of it.
Give the Holy Spirit time to respond to you.
Let’s Pray:
Heavenly Father, I thank you and praise you for your steadfast love, your kindness, and your faithfulness. I love you so much, and today through the passage from Hosea I can feel how much you love me too. AMEN.
Now we will contemplate the Lord by listening to him speak to us in the Gospels.
Visualize Christ
Today we return to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. We are back in the Court of the Gentiles, the outermost courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem.
We have just witnessed Jesus call the elite, wealthy Sadducees (who control the Temple and collude with the Roman Empire to maintain power) a brood of vipers.
The crowd is intrigued and the officials are enraged by Jesus’ sharp words of warning. This is where we see Jesus being approached by a reasonable looking scribe. You wonder to yourself if he agrees with Jesus’ words to the Sadducees and thinks Jesus to be wise.
You can see that this scribe means to ask Jesus a difficult question, perhaps testing his wisdom….
Loving God with All My Heart in Every Person
Not Far from the Kingdom of God
Mark 12:28-34
One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?”
Jesus replied, “The first is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’
The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
The scribe said to him, “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, ‘He is One and there is no other than he.’ And ‘to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself’ is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
And when Jesus saw that (he) answered with understanding, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Reflection:
Let us meditate on what Jesus means when he says, “Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
We know from the Apostle John that if we do not know God or love God we are incapable of loving others.
Why?
It is God alone who gives us the ability to love, and more succinctly, it is through Jesus Christ that we are born of God and know God, so that we can have an indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and have the power to love.
But we still have to work at it because man has free will to choose to love God for his sake or to love himself first and reject holy love.
Ask yourself, do I love God with all my heart? In what ways do I lack love for him? Do I love him with my mind? Am I filling my mind with things other than God? Do I love him in my soul? Do I set aside time every day to be in relationship with him and to worship him?
Now let’s listen to the second part of Jesus’ teaching: “The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Let us Pray:
Lord, please help me to increase my love for you in my actions, because loving you is an act of the will. Let me grow in my love for you. I know that if I do not love you well all other relationships in my life will be disordered, as true love can only come from you and you alone. You complete me so that I can give love to others in my life. AMEN.
Jesus is revealing the true source of our ability to love others.
Take a moment to ask Jesus questions from your heart. Reflect on a time when someone in your life imitated Christ in their love for you. Ask the Lord to help you recall a time when you have imitated him and loved another soul as if they were Christ to you.
Give the Holy Spirit time to respond.
Let us continue our mental prayer with a meditation from Saint Teresa of Calcutta:
Loving God with All My Heart in Every Person
Loving God through the Care of Souls
St. Teresa of Calcutta (Nobel Lecture)
The poor people are very great people. They can teach us so many beautiful things. The other day one of them came to thank and said: You people who have vowed chastity you are the best people to teach us family planning. Because it is nothing more than self-control out of love for each other. And I think they said a beautiful sentence. And these are people who maybe have nothing to eat, maybe they have not a home where to live, but they are great people. The poor are very wonderful people.
One evening we went out and we picked up four people from the street. And one of them was in a most terrible condition – and I told the Sisters: You take care of the other three, I take of this one that looked worse. So I did for her all that my love can do. I put her in bed, and there was such a beautiful smile on her face. She took hold of my hand, as she said one word only: Thank you – and she died.
I could not help but examine my conscience before her, and I asked what would I say if I was in her place. And my answer was very simple. I would have tried to draw a little attention to myself, I would have said I am hungry, that I am dying, I am cold, I am in pain, or something, but she gave me much more – she gave me her grateful love. And she died with a smile on her face….
You too try to bring that presence of God in your family, for the family that prays together stays together… Just get together, love one another, bring that peace, that joy, that strength of presence of each other in the home. And we will be able to overcome all the evil that is in the world.
There is so much suffering, so much hatred, so much misery, and we with our prayer, with our sacrifice, are beginning at home. Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do. It is to God Almighty – how much we do it does not matter, because He is infinite, but how much love we put in that action. How much we do to Him in the person that we are serving.
Reflection:
Close your eyes and let the Spirit dwell in your heart for a moment. Tell the Lord “I want to love them like you do. Thank you for showing me how Mother Teresa loved the poor, and how I should love my own family.”
Are You Listening?
Take a moment in the presence of God to show him gratitude from your heart for your family. This is a prayer of silence. Just place your hand on your heart and using your intention to open it wide for love, do so, allowing your spirit to respond to God in an intimate way. Even if you have division right now in your family, or an estrangement. Remember, God wants to heal these things. You are just making a silent act of love in the presence of God toward those he has given you to love.
Let’s Pray:
Holy Trinity, I love [name them]. I love them with the love you have given me to love them with. Thank you for loving me freely, healing my defections. Let me love them freely with the love you give me, and let me be faithful to all of them like Hosea was. AMEN.
Pray the next Lenten Meditation
Day 21 Mental Prayer Meditation
Jesus Heal Me, Bind my Wounds, Be Merciful to me a Sinner
Jesus heal me with your love. Be merciful to me a sinner, for I have been humbled. Bind my wounds with your healing touch. Help me love you, I pray.
2 Responses
I need someone to help me stay focuse on the spiritual things of God and not on the things of the world.
Frances, I will pray for you. Please also pray for me. We live in a time when it is very hard to contemplate the things of God without constant distractions. Join us again this Lent with our 40 days of meditations using the daily Mass readings.