Why "Offering Up" Is Only A Good Beginning

Last time we talked - yet again - about "offering up." Our context was the discomfort some (most?) of us experience when summer brings extreme heat and humidity. It can sometimes be so oppressive that our work suffers. We don't want to allow that to take center stage. We begin to corral the incursion by first offering up our discomfort or suffering.

Nothing new there. It simply served as a reminder of the role of offering up - a concept not so much talked about these days.

But offering up is really just the beginning. We don't want to just sit on our spiritual laurels and be content that we've somehow fulfilled a duty here. Not that fulfilling a duty is a bad thing. It's just not the whole thing.

Just as at work, doing the bare minimum can fulfill our obligations, so too can items like offering up help to do so for our spiritual life. But these bare minimums serve us best when they serve as a baseline, a kind of foundation upon which we can build something better.

As we should all know, going above and beyond the call of duty at work should be baked into our typical work day. There's the practical side of things: It's one way to "get ahead." Promotions and other forms of career advancement don't just come to us on their own. We initiate the process of advancement with our efforts.

So too, our spiritual life won't progress on its own. Offering up may be a start, but there's more we can and should do to keep the wheels sanctity turning consistently.

Of course, we should already know that barely getting by won't serve either our work life or our spiritual life well. So let's assume we already know this. And let's assume we're already approaching our work days in this spirit. 

Now that we're moving in the right direction, though, there's more to be done. And to skip the line and get to the real nub of this post, we'll turn to our dear friend Father Willie Doyle. He will turn us firmly in the direction of Our Lord and away from ourselves. And he does so in language that is quite personal and quite moving. We can take a lesson from this. Our relationship with Jesus Christ must not be a kind of baseline formal one. It needs to become more and more a deeply personal one. 

Ideally, Father's personal meditation can help us to advance in our own personal relationship with Jesus - even as we submerge ourselves in our daily labor...  

Jesus is the most loving of lovable friends there never was a friend like Him before, there never can be one to equal Him, because there is only one Jesus in the whole wide world and the vast expanse of Heaven; and that sweet and loving friend, that true lover of the holiest and purest love is my Jesus, mine alone and all mine. Every fibre of His divine nature is thrilling with love for me, every beat of His gentle Heart is a throb of intense affection for me, His sacred arms are round me, He draws me to His breast, He bends down with infinite tenderness over me, His child, for He knows I am all His and He is all mine. 

O Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! who would not love You, who would not give their heart’s blood for You, if only once they realised the depth and the breadth and the realness of Your burning love? Why not then make every human heart a burning furnace of love for You, so that sin would become an impossibility, sacrifice a pleasure and a joy, virtue the longing of every soul, so that we should live for love, dream of love, breathe Your love, and at last die of a broken heart of love, pierced through and through with the shaft of love, the sweetest gift of God to man.