Since we are patterned after Christ, we should also have the same heart as that of Christ which is full of compassion. This was shown, for example, in that episode where a big crowd followed him in a desert place and was moved with compassion and healed their sick when he saw them.
When we struggle to give our heart to the Lord, we would actually be expanding our capacity to love others, because our loving would go beyond its purely human and natural ways and would enter into the spiritual and supernatural ways of God.
To be sure, when our heart is immersed in the heart of Christ, we would find it easy to carry out our duties and tasks, whatever they may be, with order, understanding and magnanimity. That’s when we can rightfully echo St. Paul’s words when he talked about having the same feelings that Christ had. We would be very generous in our self-giving.
It’s when we learn to love the way Christ loves us that we can manage to be merciful, willing to take upon ourselves the miseries of others, and to give ourselves decisively until death itself, if only to achieve the reconciliation of everyone with God.
If we truly love God and everybody else, with a love that is nothing less than a participation of the love God has for us and as commanded by Christ to us, then we will never say enough in our self-giving.
Even if such attitude would already seem to be going beyond common sense, our reason and other human and worldly standards that we usually use to measure our love, we would still go on giving ourselves, never saying enough. We would just give and give, even if we seem to consume ourselves till death.
This is, of course, an overwhelming prospect, but that is what true love is. It is some kind of madness that knows no limits. It is given without measure, without cost, without any calculation.
But that is a very dangerous attitude to have, since it has no other way but to lead us to self-satisfaction, to complacency and spiritual lukewarmness. It would give an opening to more serious predicaments of pride and conceit, vanity, lust, sloth, etc. Hypocrisy will surely enter into our system. And instead of always being mindful and thoughtful of others, we would just be thinking of our own selves, our own interests. (Fr. Roy Cimagala)
