As we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Treatise on the Love of God by St. Francis de Sales, we also walk the Lenten journey. As we approach Holy Week, the Treatise can give us much to meditate on.
Book 13 of this holy work is its end, but for us in this season, our beginning quote:
“Mount Calvary is the mount of lovers. All love that takes not its beginning from Our Savior’s Passion is frivolous and dangerous. Unhappy is death without the love of the Savior, unhappy is love without the death of the Savior! Love and death are so mingled in the Passion of Our Savior that we cannot have the one in our heart without the other. Upon Calvary one cannot have life without love, nor love without the death of Our Redeemer. But, except there, all is either eternal death or eternal love: and all Christian wisdom consists in choosing rightly; and to assist you in that, I have made this treatise, my Theotimus.
During this mortal life we must choose eternal love or eternal death, there is no middle choice.
O eternal love, my soul desires and makes choice of thee eternally! Ah! come, Holy Spirit and inflame our hearts with thy love! To love or to die! To die and to love! To die to all other love in order to live to Jesus’s love, that we may not die eternally, but that, living in thy eternal love, O Savior of our souls we may eternally sing: Vive Jesus! I love Jesus. Live Jesus whom I love! I love Jesus, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.”