487th Meditation
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mt 22:37).
If we want to follow the loving invitation of our Father and try to center all our thoughts on Him, it is important to keep in our memory the works and the Word of God. When we meditate on the Psalms, for example, we will see that time and again the works of God are praised and admired with wonder and gratitude. If we internalize certain passages of the psalms, they can resonate within us as a “heart prayer,” keeping our souls awake in remembrance of the Lord. We should also turn everything that happens to us and that we see around us into a praise of God.
The Gospel tells us that the Virgin Mary pondered in her heart the words of Jesus (cf. Lk 2:19), so that they settled within her and remained engraved in her memory. The Holy Spirit always reminded her of the words of her Son.
The more we internalize the Word of the Lord and glorify Him with our praise, the more our soul receives spiritual nourishment. It begins to acquire a taste for the Word of God and, on the other hand, it clearly perceives what kind of nourishment it receives when it is scattered. It becomes empty on a spiritual level, cluttered with useless and meaningless content, and begins to long again for those meadows whose nourishment strengthens it and gives it wisdom.
Although we cannot simply command our thoughts to focus henceforth on God alone, we can prepare the ground so that it becomes easier and easier for them to turn to Him. On the one hand, we can do this by avoiding useless thoughts, which make our soul lethargic and spiritually sluggish, and which could also displease our Father. Secondly, we can foster it by welcoming the Word of God and pondering it in our heart, so that our life becomes an unceasing praise of His goodness. In this way, our love for God grows.
Let us recall the example we gave in the first of these meditations on how to love God with all our mind: just as the bride longs for her beloved and wastes no occasion to think of him, so our soul must long more and more for its divine Spouse and try to remember Him all the time.