Deeds

Unless my deeds make way for God’s Purpose as a reflection of love, then my deeds are worthless to Our Lord…

Cain and Abel (Museum of Art Puerto Rico)

Talk is cheap. 

When I first met my husband, we would talk to each other about love.  I suppose that many young couples discuss love in those early days when everything feels new and fresh and like a wonderful dream.  At the time it seems to me that those talks of our about love and what it felt like and how it would be and what it would look like in our lives together seemed so very important to us.  And yet over the last nearly twenty years I have come to realise that neither of us had very much of an idea about what love really was or what it meant for us in our lives together.

This is certainly not to say that we were not in love – we were.  It is simply to say that in those early days we could not have any real understanding about what a lifetime of love and commitment might look like in our lives together.

I do not speak as a person who is living in a perfect marriage or relationship.  My marriage is far from perfect.  However, I speak as someone who recognises that my marriage has survived until this point in time not from anything that I have done but from the Grace of God.

We Catholics get married inside a Church.  It is a lovely thing to think about marriage being in a pretty garden or on a yacht.  We could get married in some romantic place, but marriage itself is a sacrament because we humans require a great deal of GRACE to stay married.  Because marriage is built on a foundation of love and that love – over time – is expressed through DEEDS!

I take this example from the Holy Family.

Saint Joseph had great love for the Blessed Virgin and for the Christ-Child.  He had such love for them that he sacrificed his entire life in service of their vocations.  He gave up his own desire of children.  He gave up his own desire for a physical consummation in his marriage.  He also gave up the possibility of wealth or fame or even the chance to witness the suffering of his foster Child – who he loved with all his heart.  He accepted God’s Will in every iteration…

This Saint was able to surrender his own feelings on every matter and to perform the necessary deeds in order to make himself available to the Holy Will of God.

If it were not for his chastity, his obedience to the angels in his dreams, his willingness to live a just and honourable life, then the Messiah and the Queen of Heaven would not have been able to fulfil their purpose as well.  And it occurs to me today that unless my deeds make way for God’s Purpose as a reflection of love, then my deeds are worthless to Our Lord…  After all, talk is cheap…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.