Chapter Three
Co-Redemptive Souls
If all of you had truly been all Mine, if all my spouses had truly and fully been spouses, the world would not be where it is. So if the world is where it is, it’s because of some reservation, some withholding on your part. Isn’t there something still missing? Just one thing would be too much, spoiling the purity of this totality that alone can satisfy my Heart.
Ponder in deep meditation, all of you, this examination of love, and reform yourselves. The hour is so grave and so urgent!
Be each one of you “a fully consecrated host.”
I, your Sovereign Master, want to employ you to extend my Sovereignty of love to the entire world.
If the Father in loving the Son has placed all things in his hands, hasn’t the Spouse in loving his beloved also given his spouse all things?
“All things,” which is nothing less than my Heart with its infinite treasures of Charity. Treasures with all its virtues, its graces, its loves, its desires, poured out in torrents upon souls who are open, and who come to draw from these Treasures with the two-fold Fiat of receiving and appealing.
And by that same token, if the Son in loving the Father has restored all things in his hands, including Himself: Father, I place my life in your hands, should not also the beloved who truly loves her Spouse place all things in his hands, giving her soul over to Him totally in this spirit of co-redemptive sacrifice (holocauste) that my “appeal” is begging for?
Receiving everything from my hands, placing everything back into my hands, this is the undivided agenda of sovereign love.
In order to realize both of these in your acts, do not forget that you must open your hands and open them wide both to receive and surrender. Such is the gesture of a truly loving heart, a heart that gives “unceasingly, without reservation.” The two-sided demand of divine Sovereignty! Yes, any let-up is a limitation, any slackening a pulling back of the gift of self, the gift that is the life of love.
The love that relaxes is but a faint-hearted love! The love that keeps growing alone is true, alone is pure and strong. To give all, one must keep giving more. Meditate on this necessary union between the all and the more.
If growth is the law of all life, how can it not but be so of the life par excellence, the life of love? Read what is written in the Book of Life, the Gospel:
“I keep working" (Lk 23:46) “Jesus grew. . . .” (Jn 5:17)
In this light you will understand that the infallible route to love’s unending growth is simply that of doing always the Will of my Father. For however modest it may seem, each of his divine wishes is an appeal for more because it is an appeal for something better.
More and better in the Ecce’s boundless offering.
More and better in the Fiat’s loving fealty.
More and better in the Magnificat’s hymn of praise.
But there are privileged times when the calls for “more’ by the Father’s Will are requests for an “all” that is particularly costly, resembling more what had been asked of Me as Redeemer of the world.
The expansion of love in my terrestrial life had as its end the redemptive Cross and its accomplishment.
The hour has come for you, these most precious hours of redemptive collaboration. How are you to live them? Learn to see in the trials that afflict the world one of these calls for “more,” one of those ascensions arranged by my Heart for your hearts . . . a precious stimulant for you to give Me more love, to give Me a love that is more loving, more pure, more adoring, more zealous, more humble, more trusting, and which turns you more into a host (hostie), all in accord with the wish of my “appeal,” an appeal for more, so tender and so urgent.
