We love God only with mediocre love...

We, the Ordinary People of the Streets

These encounters teach us to be dumbstruck by grace. They then lead us to live the state of soul of a neophyte, which we too rarely realize we are. They reveal to us a depth of thanksgiving that we would never have known without them. As a rule, if they lead us into the inside of a certain anxiety or a certain missionary sorrow, they illuminate the true foundations of Christian joy.

For the faith that we have received from Jesus Christ enables us to love God because it enables us to know him. But because we often tend to live our Christianity like a habit, we do not make use of this ability, or at least we do not make sufficient use of it. We love God only with a mediocre love because our knowledge of him is mediocre. Now, it would therefore follow that the first of our tasks in time is to know God as much as possible, in order to glorify him as much as possible and to compensate as much as possible for our neighbor's lack of knowledge of him.

If we are fully convinced of this first temporal duty, I think we will be able to confront all the rest of our temporal duties without unbalancing our supernatural life: for these duties carry us implacably deeper into the first and second commandments that the Lord gave us.

Servant of God Madeleine Delbrêl

Madeleine Delbrêl (+1964) was a French laywoman, writer, and mystic devoted to caring for the poor and to evangelizing culture. 

From Magnificat