“My love for you will grow even more in your heart” (Inner Word).
From faith, we will pass to the beatific vision, and hope will be fulfilled in eternity. But love endures forever. As St. Paul exclaims in the hymn to charity: “Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away” (1 Cor. 13:8).
This is why love can and must always grow in our hearts. This happens when we cultivate an intimate relationship with our Father. The only limitation is that we cannot fully assimilate God’s love in our mortal body, but only in eternity. From now on, however, our Father wants to fill us more and more with His love and make us more and more like Him.
On one occasion, St. Jeanne de Chantal had a conversation about love with her sisters in community. They came to mention martyrdom in blood. Then, the saint referred to another kind of martyrdom: martyrdom of love. The sisters asked her how they could suffer this martyrdom, and she answered:
“Give a total yes to the Will of God and you will experience it, for the love of God pierces with its sword the most secret and intimate layers of our soul and separates us from our self-love. This martyrdom of love lasts from the moment we unconditionally consecrate ourselves to God until the end of our lives. But this only applies to magnanimous people who reserve nothing for themselves and remain faithful to love.”
A martyrdom of love – what a blessing would descend on us and on other people if we lived it! God’s love would be realized in our lives as deeply as possible in our earthly existence.
Is it a difficult path? From the outside, it might seem so. However, when God’s love grows in our hearts, he sustains us.