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Committed Sustained Informed - Intercession
A New Season
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"A New Season"

"The Fire of Love"

          In the previous teaching we began to mention the "ferocious flames" of God's love. The God of love is the God of fire; for, love's "flames are a blazing fire", and "stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion" (Songs 8:6B). True love is both unyielding and uncompromising. God is an extreme lover. He calls me to "the conflagration of consummation". I am to become fire as I am drawn more and more into His life and as I am transformed by His divine love. For, the fire of God's love seeks the inmost depths of my heart. This is to be the dwelling place of His divine flames. Do I dare allow myself to be seized and carried away by the force of His love, overwhelmed by His all-consuming fire, devoured by His deep, driven devotion?! Why not become an "incandescent" intercessor?!

          God wants my desire and longing for Him to increase, so He draws my heart through "flames of tender touches" (St. John of the Cross. Living Flame of Love, st. I, no. 8, p. 582). In a saying attributed to Jesus, cited by Origen, Jesus says, "He who is close to me is close to fire" (cited by Origen in Dictionary of Biblical Theology, p. 183). Has not Jesus said, "I have come to set the earth on fire" (Luke 12:49); and does not St. John describe Jesus in The Book of Revelation: "His eyes were [like] a fiery flame" (Rev. 1:14;19:12)?! Where there are flaming eyes, there is a flaming heart as well! How close will I allow God to draw to me?! Do I risk an all-consuming closeness, an "incinerating" oneness?!

          St. Paul reminds me that as I get closer and closer to God--drawn into His "irresistible embrace"--I am changed from 'glory to glory', and I "become more and more like the one [I] love" (Thomas Dubay, S.M., Prayer Primer: Igniting a Fire Within, p. 33). The more I am drawn into the "fierce furnace" of God's love, the more I am changed into a "living torch" of love. Fire consumes what it encounters. St. Teresa of Avila tells us that God "makes it [my soul] desire Him vehemently" (Teresa of Avila. The Interior Castle, sect. VI, chap. 2, no. 1-3, pp. 366-367). The word, vehement, means 'intense, full of vigor or energy'. Does not St. Peter exhort, "Love one another intensely from a pure heart" (1 Pet. 1:22). I can only love humanity intensely and purely as an intercessor if I first encounter and surrender to the God of devouring intensity! One can speak, in fact, of the "burning of yearning", "the fire of desire", "the forge of fierce familiarity" with the God Who "does not conquer our hearts except through the excess of love" (The Cantata of Love. Blaise Arminjon S.J., p. 153).        

Questions:

1)   Any of the questions found in the text

2)   How fierce is my friendship with God?

Scriptures:

Any scripture from the text; Jr. 23:29; Luke 24:32

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