Come, Lord Jesus

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

St. Paul says to the Thessalonians: “But you, brothers, do not live in the dark, that the day should take you unawares like a thief. No, you are children of light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to darkness, so we should not go on sleeping, as everyone else does. So then, stay wide awake and be sober” (1 Thess. 5:4-6).

Our Lord invites us to be watchful. To be watchful is to love.

The Advent liturgy of these days reminds us to repeat frequently the words, “Come, Lord Jesus.” The Entrance Antiphon of one of these days, we are told: “Behold, the Lord will come down in all his splendor and give his people peace and bring them eternal life” (Entrance Antiphon, Friday of the First, Second, Third Week of Advent).

He has to find us like the good servant who does not fall asleep during his master's absence but remains at his post, devoted to his duty. As we are told by St. [Mark]: “But I say to you, I say to all: Watch!” (Mark 13:37).

These words are addressed to men of all times. They are words that the Lord speaks to each one of us, because we can all tend toward drowsiness and comfort-seeking.

“We can't allow our hearts,” said St. Paul, “to become dulled with gluttony, drunkenness, and the cares of this life” (cf. 1 Thess. 5:6-8; after Luke 21:34).

In that way, we would lose the supernatural outlook that should give life to everything we do. Our Lord is coming to us, and we must await His arrival with a vigilant spirit.

We shouldn't be fearful, like people caught doing wrong. St. Paul continues: "Night is the time for sleepers to sleep, and night the time for drunkards to be drunk. But we belong to the day, and we should be sober. Let us put on faith and love for our breastplate, and the hope of salvation for a helmet" (ibid.).

“God destined us not for his retribution, but to win salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that, awake or asleep, we should live united to him. Give encouragement to each other, and keep strengthening one another, as you do already” (1 Thess. 5:9-11).

We are invited to put these words into practice. Keeping watch above all is a matter of loving. We should be attentive and cheerful, like eager people who expect a long-awaited loved one.

We might have difficulties in keeping our love awake. Selfishness, or a lack of mortification and temperance, always threaten to extinguish the flame that Our Lord lights time and again in our hearts.

That is why we need constantly to revive the flame, to shake ourselves out of any repetitive routine, to struggle. St. Paul compares this watchfulness to the well-armed soldier on guard duty who does not allow himself to be taken by surprise (cf. 1 Cor. 16:13).

The first Christians repeated frequently and lovingly the aspiration, “Come, Lord Jesus” (The Navarre Bible, note to Mark 13:33-37). Through practicing their faith in this way, those faithful members of the Church found the interior strength and optimism that they needed if they were to fulfill their family and social duties. At the same time, they detached themselves interiorly from earthly goods, with the mastery that comes from the hope of eternal life.

As we prepare these days for Christmas, we could say that aspiration frequently to Our Lord and ask Him to help us to see concrete ways in our home, in our office, in our school that we could do other things for other people around us, to be more generous, be more thoughtful, be kinder, be more patient, to see how we can make life more pleasant for other people, as we prepare for this great celebration of the Incarnation.

And if we're watchful, watching for the coming of Christ well, the meeting that each one of us will have with Our Lord will not come unexpectedly, because we have been on the watch.

We've been told that He will come “like a thief in the night” (1 Thess. 5:2). And that won't be a surprise for us because there will already have been many meetings with Him each day; meetings in the sacraments, in ordinary happenings of the day which have been full of love and friendship.

In the Opening Prayer of the Mass for the 21st of December, we say, “In your goodness, Lord, listen to your people's prayer. They rejoice at your son's coming in human form like our own. Grant that when he comes again in majesty, we may receive the reward of eternal life.”

So, vigilance has to be in the little things of each day: our mental prayer each day, our daily examination of conscience, the small mortifications which keep us alert.

We need to be on our guard not only against God's enemies, but also against the complicity offered by our evil inclinations.

We told in St. Matthew, “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matt. 26:41).

We are alert when we make an effort to improve our personal prayer, which in turn increases our desire for holiness and helps us to avoid lukewarmness.

We will also stay awake to the things of God, by living a spirit of mortification. We strengthen our vigilance through doing a careful examination of conscience, so that we don't fall into the situation as though spoken by Our Lord but described by St. Augustine in one of his sermons when he says:

“For while you give yourself up to evil, you come to consider yourself good because you don't take the trouble to look at yourself. You reproach others and do not take stock of yourself. You accuse others and do not examine yourself. You place them before your very eyes, and you place yourself behind your back. So that when the time comes for me to reckon with you, I will do the opposite. I will turn you around and confront you with yourself and then you will see yourself and you will weep” (St. Augustine, Sermon 17).

St. Josemaría in The Way, Point 307, says, “That supernatural mode of conduct is truly a military tactic. You carry on the war—the daily struggles of your interior life—far from the main walls of the fortress.

“And the enemy meets you there: in your small mortifications, your customary prayer, your methodical work, your plan of life: and only with difficulty will he come close to the easily scaled battlements of your castle. And if he does, he comes exhausted.”

If in our examination of conscience we consider the little things of each day, we will find the true way and will discover the root causes of our failings in the love of God. Little things generally open the way to big things.

Our daily meditation will keep us on the lookout for the enemy who never sleeps (Prov. 4:16) and will give us strength to bear and overcome temptations and difficulties.

Advent is meant to be a time of penance, a time of preparation and mortification. We could examine our spirit of mortification in the ordinary things of each day by willingly complicating life for ourselves a little bit more for Jesus Christ.

If we bring these reflections to our prayer, we will find the means to struggle against that ‘old person’ within us—those less-than-upright tendencies that remain latent within us, our laziness, our sensuality, our lack of charity, our pride, and our vanity.

To achieve that necessary interior mortification, we need to practice the mortification of our memory and of our imagination. If we do this, we will be able to eliminate from our understanding those troublesome things that prevent us from carrying out God's will to the full.

In these days before Christmas, we need to tone up our interior mortification so that we can receive Christ with a clean mind. We can try to get rid of anything that goes against or does not belong to our way. Then our mind will no longer contain anything that does not belong to God.

In The Way, Point 173, we are told: "That joke, that witty remark held on the tip of your tongue; the cheerful smile for those who annoy you; that silence when you are unjustly accused; your friendly conversation with people whom you find boring and tactless; the daily effort to overlook one irritating detail or another in the persons who live with you. … this, with perseverance, is indeed solid interior mortification.”

That purification of the soul through interior mortification is not something merely negative. It is not just a matter of avoiding what borders on sin. Quite the opposite: it consists of knowing how to deprive oneself, for love of God, of those things that it would be quite licit to have.

This mortification, which aims to purify the mind of everything that is not of God, aims in the first place to seek at freeing the memory from recollections that oppose the way that leads to heaven. Those recollections can assault us during our daily work, or our rest, or even while we are praying.

Without violence, but promptly, we can apply the means to get rid of them. We can struggle to make the effort which is necessary for our mind to fill itself once more with love and a longing for the things of God.

Something similar can happen to the imagination. It can often upset us by inventing all kinds of novels, weaving fantastic fictions that are quite useless. As St. Josemaría says in The Way, Point 13: “Get rid of those useless thoughts which are, at best, but a waste of time.”

And then, we also have to react quickly and return serenely to our ordinary task. Interior mortification doesn't end with emptying the understanding of useless thoughts. It goes much further. The mortification of our potencies opens up to us the way to contemplative life, in whatever circumstances God has chosen to place us.

With that interior silence towards everything that goes against God's wishes and is improper to His children, the soul will find itself well-disposed for a continuous and intimate dialogue with Jesus Christ. In that dialogue, our imagination aids contemplation—for example, when we meditate on the Gospel or the mysteries of the Rosary.

It is then that our memory recalls the wonders God has done for us and His abundant goodness. This remembrance can cause our hearts to burn with gratitude and ardent love.

And so, the Advent liturgy repeats its urgent message many times: The Lord is coming, and we have to prepare a broad path for Him a clean heart. “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Ps. 51:10).

We can try to make a resolution from this day, in our prayer, to empty our hearts of anything displeasing to God. We make the resolution to purify our hearts through mortification and fill them with love for God while constantly showing affection to Our Lord. We do this in the same way that Our Lady and St. Joseph did, by saying aspirations, making spiritual communions, and offering many acts of love and atonement.

Many other souls will benefit from the effort we make to prepare a worthy dwelling place for Our Lord. We can say many times to those who walk along the same paths as we do what is so simply expressed in a simple poem:

“I know of a smooth path by which we can reach God, holding tight Our Lady's hand.”

We can ask her to let us walk throughout our lives, as St. Paul asked the first Christians in Ephesus: “to walk in love” (Eph. 5:2).

God's kindness towards men is much greater than anything we can imagine. He has made us His children, with a genuine, true filiation. St. John says, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are" (1 John 3:1).

It is with a childlike spirit that we can repeat these words of expectation, of hope, of joy, of excitement: “Come, Lord Jesus.”

The greatest proof of God's love for men is that He has shown us the tenderness and selflessness of a father. He even compares Himself to a mother who can never forget her child (Isa. 49:15).

This child, so dearly loved, is every man and woman. When we were lost through sin, He sent His Son to save us. His life, sacrificed for us, would redeem us from our fallen state, from sin, and death, and hell.

As St. John tells us, “The love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9). That same love leads Him to give Himself to us entirely, in a habitual manner, so He dwells in our souls in grace and speaks to us in our heart.

It would be sad if, in answer to so much love, men were to show to God a cold indifference, and particularly if they were to busily fabricate a world in which man becomes the measure of all things. Misinterpreting the passage of Scripture that says, “He who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20), some people say that only man deserves to be loved. God, in their book, is a stranger, remote and inaccessible.

This is a new and blasphemous humanism masquerading as defender of the dignity of man while seeking to have the Creator supplanted by His creature. Such an untrue humanism destroys the very possibility of truly loving God or man.

By its giving a finite and limited creature—the human individual—an absolute value everything comes to be of only a secondary, utilitarian interest. The exclusion of God, the only being lovable in Himself and for Himself, never leads to a greater love for anyone or anything else.

And as certain consequences denote, it can only lead to hatred, the condition and atmosphere proper to hell itself. Without God, love for creatures dies or is fatally corrupted.

Man’s true response to the love of God, always compassionate and merciful, is contained in the Psalm: “My soul, give thanks to the Lord; all my being, bless his holy name. My soul, give thanks to the Lord and never forget all his blessings” (Ps. 103:1-2).

When we fail to correspond with this deep love, when we’re unfaithful, God rightly complains. We’re told in the Psalms: “It is not an enemy who taunts me, then I could bear it. But it is you, my companion, my familiar friend” (Ps. 55:12-13).

St. John of [Ávila] has written: “Lord, you want the fire of our love to burn until we are set alight, until all that we are is consumed in its flame, so that we become transformed into you, our God. You blow upon that flame with the graces which your life has won for us, and you enkindle it with the death you endured for us" (St. John of Ávila, Audi filia).

We can ask ourselves in the intimacy of our prayer: Does my love for God burn in that way? Is it shown in my generously corresponding with what God asks of me, with my vocation? Is my whole life an answer to the commitment of love that binds me to God?

When I say those words, “Come, Lord Jesus,” do I really mean it in my actions, in my quest for virtue, in my generosity?

St. Josemaría in The Forge, Point 506, says, "Be convinced, my child, that God has a right to ask of us: Are you thinking about me? Are you aware of me? Do you look for me as your support? Do you seek me as the Light of your life, as your shield…, as your all?”

God loves us with a personal, individual love. He is coming to each one of us this Christmas in a very personal, individual, intimate way. Even if we were the only person on the whole planet, He would still be coming to us. He has showered His blessings upon us, and love is repaid with love.

God decided, in His infinite wisdom, to make us sharers in His love and His truth. Although we were capable of loving Him naturally, with our own strength, He knew that only if He gave us His love itself would we be able to attain intimate union with Him.

Through the Incarnation of His only begotten Son, He restored the order that had been destroyed, uniting the divine with the human. He raised us to the dignity of being His children and so revealed the fullness of His love for us.

“Because we are sons,” as St. Paul says to the Galatians, “God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts" (Gal. 4:6), Him who is the Paraclete, the greatest gift He could grant us.

He loves each one of us as a unique person. He has often “spoken to our heart” and told us clearly, “You are mine” (Ps. 43:1). He has never stopped loving us, helping us, protecting us, talking to us, not even when our response has been monstrous ingratitude or serious sin. Perhaps we have received even more attention from God in those times.

We have to try and see how we correspond with that love, look at how we fulfill our duties, in the fulfillment of which He waits for us, as in the loving attention we give to our practices of piety.

How is my apostolate of friendship with my companions? Do I give myself generously, even in the smallest details which our vocation to holiness demands?

Do we perhaps allow lukewarmness to infiltrate through the cracks of a superficial examination which limits itself to a mere external or more or less mechanical carrying out of obligations?

St. Teresa of Ávila reminds us, “We should remember with what love he has bestowed all these favors upon us, and how enormous is the love God has revealed to us, for love begets love. And though we may be only beginners—and very wicked at that—let us strive ever to bear this in mind and awaken our own love.” When we contemplate the love of God, “love is roused in us and awakens us to a greater love” (Teresa of Ávila, Life).

Speaking of the love of Christ, John Paul II encourages us to correspondence with it in that well-known phrase: “Love is repaid with love” (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility; Address, October 31, 1982).

If we can contemplate the love God has for us, it will lead us to ask Him for more love. St. John of the Cross said:

"Reveal your presence and let the vision of your beauty kill me. Behold, the malady of love is incurable except in your presence, and before your face" (St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle).

We could ask Our Lady, like little children, to help us repeat those little words—early in the morning, late at night, before we go to bed, during the day—so that we make these days of Advent a particularly intense time of that preparation and expectation, as the Church wants it to be for each one of us: “Come, Lord Jesus.”

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.