The persevering love of Jesus is the unquenchable love.

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I came across the following reflexion in the Magnificat monthly missal/prayer book that we use for our daily Masses that the school Chaplain celebrates in our community. It spoke to me deeply through its distinction between "sometimes-love" and "always-love" and the call from Jesus to embrace, as he did, the latter type of love, God's unquenchable love that he has placed in our hearts and that takes us away from the dead end of selfish/self love.


Father-Centered with Jesus 

MOTHER MARY FRANCIS, P.C.C.

The persevering love of Jesus is the unquenchable love.

Jesus did the will of the Father when it was not at all pleasing to his human nature. It was not pleasing, even long before the Passion, to be treated with ingratitude, to be disappointed again and again, to receive such small returns for his love. But he did the will of the Father always and not just when it was agreeable to his humanity.
Out of that constancy comes directly that persevering love absolutely characteristic of Jesus. Saint John says of him that, "having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (Jn 13:1). Again, we see in ourselves, flowing right out of the previous consideration, a sometimes-love, a self-centeredness. Christ was always Father-centered and other-centered.

It is when we are focused on ourselves that we have sometimes-love. When we look back on our own lives, we realize that we have sometimes experienced that feeling of "What's the use?" in situations, particularly at times with persons.  And yet there is that unquenchable love that God has put in our hearts, which comes up like a tide and against all evidence to the contrary.  It urges us to say, "No, I will try again." This is what we want to nurture in ourselves. This is of Christ. It is the always-love.

This persevering, constant love, like mobility and the faith response, comes out of suffering and pain. The love that is not persevering, the sometimes-love that separates us from Christ, is a matter of emotions, situations, persons, circumstances, surprises. But the persevering love of Jesus is the unquenchable love.

MOTHER MARY FRANCIS, P.C.C.
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/Interiorlife/iloo82.htm

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