Nupital Union

Lately, the daily readings at Mass cover some key points that I want to make, and tomorrow’s reading is no exception. The passage I will examine is the first reading which comes from 1 John 3:7-10:
“Children, let no one deceive you. The person who acts in righteousness is righteous, just as he is righteous. Whoever sins belongs to the Devil, because the Devil has sinned from the beginning. Indeed, the Son of God was revealed to destroy the works of the Devil. No one who is begotten by God commits sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot sin because he is begotten by God. In this way, the children of God and the children of the Devil are made plain; no one who fails to act in righteousness belongs to God, nor anyone who does not love his brother.”

To be saved, we have to be righteous, and to be righteous, we have to act in righteousness. Salvation is not some external imputation, for if it is merely an external imputation, then we would still be attached to serious sin, and whoever sins belongs to the Devil. The works of the Devil are to lead us into and keep us bound to sin. The work of God destroys these evil works and gives us the grace to act in righteousness, for there is no salvation apart from interior holiness. With God’s grace, we are truly God’s children with His seed within us which helps us to do and love the good, which helps us to actually love our brother. God transforms us into Himself and perfects and elevates our nature. He seeks the greatest intimacy with you and me, and the symbol of that intimacy is that of marriage.

I end tonight with some words of our beloved Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, from his general audience of Wednesday, May 2, 2007, where he quotes the early Church Father, Origen, as well as John Paul the Great:
“The prayer of the Alexandrian [Origen] thus attained the loftiest levels of mysticism, as is attested to by his Homilies on the Song of Songs. A passage is presented in which Origen confessed: ‘I have often felt - God is my witness - that the Bridegroom came to me in the most exalted way. Then he suddenly left, and I was unable to find what I was seeking. Once again, I am taken by the desire for his coming and sometimes he returns, and when he has appeared to me, when I hold him with my hands, once again he flees from me, and when he has vanished I start again to seek him...’ ”(Hom. in Cant. 1, 7).
“I remember what my Venerable Predecessor wrote as an authentic witness in Novo Millennio Ineunte, where he showed the faithful ‘how prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved, vibrating at the Spirit's touch, resting filially within the Father's heart’.”
“ ‘It is’, John Paul II continues, ‘a journey totally sustained by grace, which nonetheless demands an intense spiritual commitment and is no stranger to painful purifications.... But it leads, in various possible ways, to the ineffable joy experienced by mystics as ‘nuptial union' ” ”(n. 33).

God proposes to you saying, “Will you marry me?”

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
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