To Love Jesus as He Has Never Been Loved Before
To Commemorate the tenth anniversary of the earthquake that took Sister Clare Crockett’s life, Vultus Christi is posting a series on Sister Clare and good zeal. Our first post described the zeal with which Sister Clare and those with her responded to a flood that happened five days before the earthquake. Our second post dove deeper into the nature of that zeal that she exemplified. This third post describes the love that Sister Clare exhibited, which is part of the essence of zeal.
If you only knew how much I want to be indifferent to the things of this earth. What do all created beauties mean to me, I would be unhappy possessing them, my heart would be so empty! . . . It is incredible how big my heart appears to me when I consider all earth’s treasures. But when I consider Jesus, how little it appears to me!. . . I would so much like to love Him!. . . Love Him more than He has ever been loved! -Saint Thérèse
The great motivation of Saint Thérèse was to love Jesus. She said to Jesus: “What this child asks for is Love. She knows only one thing: to love You, O Jesus.” She admitted: “You know, O my God, I have never desired anything but to love You, and I am ambitious for no other glory. Your Love has gone before me, and it has grown with me, and now it is an abyss whose depths I cannot fathom. Love attracts love, and, my Jesus, my love leaps toward Yours; it would like to fill the abyss which attracts it, but alas! it is not even like a drop of dew lost in the ocean! For me to love You as You love me, I would have to borrow Your own Love, and then only would I be at rest.” She said to the Most Blessed Trinity that her desire was “to Love You and make You Loved.” She also said: “What do death or life mean to me? Jesus, my joy is to love You.”
In 1934 — roughly 40 years later — Saint Faustina wrote something very similar:
O Supreme Good, I want to love You as no one on earth has ever loved You before! I want to adore You with every moment of my life and unite my will closely to Your holy will. My life is not drab or monotonous, but it is varied like a garden of fragrant flowers, so that I don’t know which flower to pick first, the lily of suffering or the rose of love of neighbor or the violet of humility. I will not enumerate these treasures in which my every day abounds. It is a great thing to know how to make use of the present moment.
Mother Teresa also prayed nearly the same thing repeatedly over the course of decades.
As for myself—there is but one desire—to love God as He has never been loved—with deep personal love.—In my heart there seems to be no other thing but He—no other love but His…
As for these three Saints, it was love — the audacity of great love — that attracted Sister Clare. We can see this reflected in what Sister Clare wrote on 31 August, 2012, she prayed:
Protect me [Lord], because I know the devil is going to attack. Once again, today, I give You my blank check. Once again, today, I open my heart to You, to love You as I have never loved You before. My heart is Yours, my mind is Yours, and my thoughts are Yours. Ask of me whatever You wish; nothing matters anymore, because nothing is mine. Possess me, Jesus; possess me, Mary.”
By the time of the earthquake, her love was all consuming. Sister Clare wanted and seemed to try to not let a single moment pass without loving Jesus and making Him loved. Seven months before her death, she writes of this love:
When I am before the Eucharistic Love…I long to love God with my whole heart. I want Him to be everything to me, and I tell Him so. In prayer I hardly have to say anything at all; I experience that just by looking at Him in the Eucharist, He is redeeming me: ‘In Him redemption is abundant.’ There are even days when I experience that Jesus wants to bring me inside the Eucharist, and nothing else exists in that moment.
She added: ““The Lord is asking me to love Him with GREATER INTENSITY”.
Using Every Moment
Saint Faustina, in the words quoted above, exclaimed: “It is a great thing to know how to make use of the present moment.” It is a good thought at the beginning of each day that God has given it to us because it is another day to love and serve the Lord. But the saints who had an intensity of love were not content to see each day as an opportunity to love and serve the Lord. They say at each moment: “Another moment to love and serve the Lord.”
It was moment by moment, step by step, yes by yes, grace by grace that Sister Clare moved from sinner to saint in but fifteen short years. Saint Thérèse’s sister Marie wrote to her almost exactly a year before the Saint’s death her reaction to reading the letter Thérèse had sent her:
Oh! I wanted to cry when I read these lines that are not from earth but an echo from the Heart of God…Do you want me to tell you? Well, you are possessed by God, but what is called…absolutely possessed, just as the wicked are possessed by the devil.
One cannot help escape the impression, reading Alone with Christ Alone, that something similar could be said about Sister Clare in her last months.
At What Point Did She Become a Saint?
If Sister Clare is ever canonised, it will be difficult to say at what moment she became a saint. Her holiness came gradually through the zeal that transformed each moment, moment by moment, by saying ‘Yes’ in the midst of her weakness, ignorance, falls, discouragement. She became a saint by forgetting herself and all that was not the love of Jesus in that moment. This came not by being a giant of spiritual athleticism so much as by letting herself be someone weak and utterly dependent on the grace Jesus offers in each moment. She was humiliated, brought down to nothing, but she never lost her desire to belong entirely to Jesus, and He worked this desire in her admirably.
What desire? To love Him and to make Him loved. What else matters? and what can get in the way? For this, weakness and all sorts of misery are only an asset. No, nothing can get in the way — nothing, that is, besides getting too big to rest against His breast and listen to His heart.
If she became holy like this, why not us? Why shouldn’t you and I also love Him as He’s never been loved before? We too would be able to say what Sister Clare wrote on 30 August, 2006:
Who am I that You care for me? Great is Your love. Great is Your mercy, great is Your Name in all the earth. I am worth so much in God’s eyes. He did not spare His only Son for me. I owe Him so much. Just as You completely denied Yourself for love of me, give me the grace to deny myself for love of You. You weren’t satisfied with only becoming man; in Your Humility You become bread. You continually humble Yourself to demonstrate Your love. Help me to respond to that love.
As we begin to examine zeal, let us make these sentiments our own. It means we’ll have to become smaller but that just makes us like Jesus, as Sister Clare said. Consider this quotation that Sister Clare copied out from Father Segundo Llorente, a Spanish missionary in Alaska who died in 1989. I think it describes her road to holiness, and it applies to us too.
The saint is a miracle of grace. He does the same things as very good people, but he does them better or he does more: a bit more humility, a bit more participation in the hardest tasks, a bit more delicacy in charity, more intense fervor, more and longer visits to the Blessed Sacrament, more time on his knees. He never or hardly ever makes excuses for his mistakes. He kisses the crucifix with a few more ounces of affection. When he looks at God, he does so with his most charming smile. Experiencing God’s absence nearly kills him. His zeal for God’s glory and the salvation of souls consumes his heart.
These were also Sister Clare’s qualities by the end of her life.
Small Moments, Great Graces
What is interesting about the list of the traits of the saint from Father Segundo Llorente is how it starts out small (“a bit more…a bit more…a bit more…”) and ends in a consuming fire (“his zeal for God’s glory and the salvation of souls consumes his heart”). Mother Teresa said: “The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love”. Experience shows that the demon of acedia, whose teeth sink deep, suppresses the fire of zeal, hates it, argues against it, turns it to pride and bitterness. But he is almost incapable of resisting the very little, humble, unnoticed acts of zeal. And these, repeated with ever increasing love, as Mother Teresa says, become a conflagration in an almost hidden way, whilst both we (and the demon of acedia as well!) remain largely unaware of the fact. How quickly this can happen when the Holy Spirit breathes on it! But it must begin small: in weakness and wretchedness, for we are so weak. As Jean Pierre de Caussade says in Abandonment to Divine Providence:
But I suffer all this destitution so imperfectly, so feebly ! Another unfelt grace; God preserve you from suffering with great courage, and a strength that can be realised. What an amount of secret complacency, of idle reflexions about yourself, would result to spoil the work of God ! An invisible hand supports you enough to render you victorious, and the keen sense of your weakness makes you humble even in victory. Oh! how advantageous it is to endure feebly and patiently rather than to suffer grandly, powerfully, and courageously. We are humiliated and feel our weakness and littleness in these sorts of victories, while in the other kind we feel that we are behaving grandly, strongly, and courageously, and without perceiving it we become inflated with vanity, presumption, and self-satisfaction. Let us admire the wisdom and the goodness of God, who so well knows how to mix and proportion all things for our profit and advantage; whereas if He arranged matters to our liking all would be spoiled, corrupted and, possibly, lost.
The Example of Sister Clare’s Life
Sister Clare is a perfect example of this. What little beginnings she started from!
The first prayer she ever meant was “What’s the craic?” (which means: “How’s it going?”), yet her last weeks were spent as if she were a lute vibrating at the touch of the finger of God’s right hand.
It began with a grace, one of those little graces that we often let slip by unnoticed. Yet these graces are offered to all of us. Consider the words of St. Thérèse:
Today, I thought of the courageous act I did one Christmas past. The words addressed to Judith came into my mind: ‘You have acted with manly courage, your heart has been strengthened.’ Many souls say: ‘I don’t have the strength to accomplish this sacrifice.’ Let them do what I did! Exert a great effort! God never refuses that first grace that gives one the courage to act; afterwards, the heart is strengthened and one advances from victory to victory. (Last Conversations. Two months before death)
God grant that we too, by being faithful to that first grace that merits the next grace, may love Jesus as He has never been loved before.
