Opening my tablet before adoration today, I viewed again my beautiful pic of golden sunflowers adoring the sun. I remembered my post “Sunflowers of Jesus,” and went to it to reread it. I was struck by my last comment: “ All who love the Will of God are the sunflowers of Jesus caught in one and only one, sacred, incessant action, a gaze of love which never turns away from His radiance.”
As I continued in adoration, I reflected: “This is my mission, to remain with Him in His anguish for souls, but also to be caught up, to remain in this one, sacred, incessant act–the gaze of love on His radiance.
One–undivided, single, simple, whole, all all all–total abandonment–to be His consolation, His little sunflower, my face always lifted to His face.
As the dark days come, let me never forget, even as we mourn for the brokenness of our world, that I must be that little spot of light, that golden sunflower of love following the Beloved Face.”
As I basked in the warmth of that reflection, soaking up the meaning, my face to His face, I reread again another post, “Consume me incessantly.” Hugh Owens wrote in his book New and Divine: The Holiness of the Third Christian Millennium:
“…the love of God is not a series of acts but a single successionless act in which a soul can actually abide through perfect abandonment.” (p. 83)
“Thus, on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, 1895, St. Therese performed the most important act of her life, her ‘great offering.’ She wrote:
‘In order to live in one single act of perfect love, I offer myself as a victim or holocaust to your merciful love, asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of Your Love, O my God.’”
This is the “one and only one, sacred, incessant act–the act of the sunflower’s golden face caught in adoration of the Sun, the whole body and being of the sunflower ever turning, ever following her Lord. This is the abandonment I seek, to remain in anguish for souls with Him–but at the same time bathed in the joyful ecstasy of His radiance–never one without the other.
SOUL FOOD MINISTRIES 