Love is the Key
July 14, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? Yesterday, I
received this message from my brother “Hi Pinky, yesterday I was talking to
Jean. They went to visit a chapel in New
Zealand which is filled with statues of Mary Mother of God. Then she mentioned that it was you who taught
her how to pray the Rosary.” Isn’t that
a joy to hear? Again that is a credit to
Our Lady that she allows me to enjoy with her.
It is true I did teach her how ot pray the Rosary some two, three years
ago! She was willing to learn and took it
to heart.
This coming Thursday, the
16th of July, is the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Following is a short article about her from
the Daily Roman Missal.
16 July Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Hermits lived on Mount
Carmel near the Fountain of Elijah (northern Israel) in the 12th century. They
had a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. By the 13th century they became known as
“Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.” They soon celebrated a special Mass and
Office in honour of Mary. In 1726 it became a celebration of the universal
Church under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. For centuries the
Carmelites have seen themselves as specially related to Mary. Their great
saints and theologians have promoted devotion to her and often championed the
mystery of her Immaculate Conception.
St. Teresa of Avila called Carmel “the Order of the Virgin.” St. John of the Cross credited Mary with saving him from drowning as a child, leading him to Carmel and helping him escape from prison. St. Theresa of the Child Jesus believed that Mary cured her from illness. On her First Communion, she dedicated her life to Mary. During the last days of her life she frequently spoke of Mary.
There is a tradition that Mary appeared to St. Simon Stock, a prior general of the Carmelites, on this day in 1251 with the scapular of the order in her hand. This scapular she gave him with the words: "Hoc erit tibi et cunctis Carmelitis privilegium, in hoc habitu moriens salvabitur" (This shall be the privilege for you and for all the Carmelites, that anyone dying in this habit shall be saved). On account of this great privilege many distinguished Englishmen, such as King Edward II, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, and many others of the nobility secretly wore (clam portaverunt) the Carmelite scapular under their clothing and died with it on. At a later date, probably not until the sixteenth century, instead of the scapular of the order, the small scapular was given as a token of the scapular brotherhood. Today the brotherhood regards this as its chief privilege, and one it owes to St. Simon Stock, that anyone who dies wearing the scapular is not eternally lost. St John Paul II, addressing the Carmelite community in 2001 said: "Over time this rich Marian heritage of Carmel has become, through the spread of the Holy Scapular devotion, a treasure for the whole Church. By its simplicity, its anthropological value and its relationship to Mary's role in regard to the Church and humanity, this devotion was so deeply and widely accepted by the People of God that it came to be expressed in the memorial of 16 July on the liturgical calendar of the universal Church.
Now let us continue with the third word of Christ on the Cross on the suffering of the Innocent (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
3 Suffering of the
Innocent
Why do the innocent suffer?
We do not mean the innocent who have suffering involuntarily thrust upon them,
but rather those good souls who go out in search of suffering and are impatient
until they find a cross. In other words, why should there be Carmelites, Poor
Clares, Trappists, Little Sisters of the Poor, and dozens of penitential orders
of the Church, who do nothing but sacrifice and suffer for the sins of men?
Certainly not because suffering is necessarily connected with personal sin. Our Lord told us that much, when to those who asked concerning a blind man, “Who hath sinned, this man, or his parents?”, Our Lord answered “Neither” (see John 9:2–3).
If we are to find the answer, we must go not merely to the suffering of innocent people, but to the suffering of Innocence itself. In this third word, our attention is riveted upon the two most sinless creatures who ever trod our sinful earth: Jesus and Mary.
Jesus Himself was sinless by nature, for He is the all-holy Son of God. Mary was sinless by grace, for she is “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” And yet both suffer in the extreme. Why did He suffer who had the power of God to escape the Cross? Why did she suffer who could have dispensed herself because of her virtue, or could have been excused by her Divine Son?
Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives — that is the way the world judges it — but the joy and peace it can purchase for others.
It counts not the wine it drinks, but the wine
it serves. Love is not a circle circumscribed by self; it is a cross with arms
embracing all humanity. It thinks not of having, but of being had; not of
possessing, but of being possessed; not of owning, but of being owned.
Love, then, by its nature is social. Its greatest happiness is to gird its loins and serve at the banquet of life. Its greatest unhappiness is to be denied the joy of sacrifice for others. That is why in the face of pain, love seeks to unburden the sufferer and take his pain, and that is why in the face of sin, love seeks to atone for the injustice of him who sinned.
Because mothers love, do they not want to take the pain of their children’s wounds? Because fathers love, do they not take over the debts of wayward sons to expiate their foolishness?
What does all this mean but the “otherness” of
love? In fact, love is so social, it would reject emancipation from pain if the
emancipation were for itself alone. Love refuses to accept individual
salvation; it never bends over man, as the healthy over the sick, but enters
into him to take his very sickness.
It refuses to have its eyes clear when other eyes are bedewed with tears; it cannot be happy unless everyone is happy, or unless justice is served; it shrinks from isolation and aloofness from the burdens and hungers of others. It spurns insulation from the shock of the world’s sorrow, but insinuates itself into them, as if the sorrow were its very own.
This is not difficult to understand. Would you want to be the only person in all the world who had eyes to see? Would you want to be the only one who could walk in a universe of the lame? Would you, if you loved your family, stand on the dock and watch them all drown before your very eyes?
And if not, why not? Very simply, because you love them, because you feel so much one with them that their heartaches are your heartbreaks.
Now apply this to Our Lord and His Blessed Mother. Here is love at its peak, and innocence at its best. Can they be indifferent to that which is a greater evil than pain — namely, sin? Can they watch humanity carry a cross to the Golgotha of death, while they themselves refuse to share its weight? Can they be indifferent to the outcome of love if they themselves are love? If love means identification and sympathy with the one loved, why should not God so love the world as to send His only-begotten Son into it to redeem it? And if that Divine Son loved the world enough to die for it, why should not the Mother of Love Incarnate share that redemption? If human love identifies itself with the pain of the one loved, why should not Divine Love suffer when it comes in contact with sin in man? If mothers suffer in their children, if a husband grieves in the sorrow of his wife, and if friends feel the agony of their beloved’s cross, why should not Jesus and Mary suffer in the humanity they love?
If you would die for your family, of which you are the head, why should not He die for humanity, of which He is the Head? And if the deeper the love, the more poignant the pain, why should not the Crucifixion be born of that love?
If a sensitive nerve is touched, it registers pain in the brain; and since Our Lord is the Head of suffering humanity, He felt every sin of every man as His own. That is why the Cross was inevitable.
He could not love us perfectly unless He died for us. And His Mother could not love Him perfectly unless she shared that death. That is why His life was given for us, and her heart broken for us; and that, too, is why He is Redeemer, and she is Redemptrix — because they love.
To reveal more completely that a Cross was made up of the juncture of Love and sin, Our Lord spoke His third word to His Mother: “Woman, behold thy son”! He did not call her “Mother” but “Woman”; except when addressing John, the next moment He added: “[Son], behold thy Mother.”
The term Woman indicated a wider relationship to all humanity than Mother. It meant that she was to be not only His Mother but also the Mother of all men, as He was the Savior of all men. She was now to have many children — not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Jesus was her firstborn of the flesh in joy; John was her second-born of the spirit in sorrow, and we her millionth and millionth born.
If she loved Him who died for all men, then she must love those for whom He died. That was His clear, unmistakable meaning. The love of neighbor is inseparable from the love of God. His love had no limits; He died for every man. Her love, then, must have no limits.
It must not be merely unselfish; it must even be social. She must be the Mother of every man. An earthly mother loves her own children most, but Jesus is now telling her that even John is her son, too, and John was the symbol of all of us.
The Father did not spare His
Son, nor did the Son spare His Mother, for love knows no bounds. Jesus had a sense
of responsibility for every soul in the world; Mary, too, inspired by His love,
had a corresponding sense of responsibility. If He would be the Redeemer of the
wayward children, she must be their Mother.
Now, does that throw any light on the problem? Why do innocent, pure, good souls leave the world and its pleasures, feast on fasts, embrace the cross, and pray their hearts out? The answer is because they love. “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
They love the world so much that they want to save it, and they know there is no other way to save it, than to die for it. Many of us so love the world that we live in it and are of it, but in the end, do nothing for it. Wrong indeed are they who say these innocent victims hate the world.
Our Lord did not hate the world; it hated Him. But He loved it. Neither do they hate the world; they are in love with it and everyone in it. They so much love the sinners in it, that they expiate for their sins; they so much love the communists in it, that they bless them as those communists send them to their God; they so much love the atheists in it, that they are willing to surrender the joy of the divine presence that the atheist may feel less afraid in the dark.
They are so much lovers of
the world that they may be said to be organic with it. They know that things
and souls are so much interrelated that the good that one does has repercussion
on the millions, just as ten just men could have saved Sodom and Gomorrah. If a
stone is thrown into the sea, it causes a ripple that widens in ever greater
circles until it affects even the most distant shore; a rattle dropped from a
baby’s crib affects even the most distant star; a finger is burned, and the
whole body feels the pain.
The cosmos, then, is organic, but so is humanity. We are all called to be members of a great family.
God is our Father, who sent His Son into the world to be our Brother, and He on the Cross asked Mary to be our Mother. Now, if in the human body it is possible to graft skin from one member to another, why is it not possible also to graft prayer?
If it is possible to transfuse blood, why is it not possible also to transfuse sacrifice? Why cannot the innocent atone for the sinful?
Why cannot the real lovers of
souls, who refuse to be emancipated from sorrow, do for the world what Jesus
did on the Cross and Mary did beneath it? The answer to this question has
filled the cloisters.
No one on earth can measure the good these divine lovers are doing for the world. How often have they stayed the wrath of a righteous God! How many sinners have they brought to the confessional! How many deathbed conversions have they effected! How many persecutions have they averted!
We do not know, and they do not want to know, so long as love wins over hate. But let us not be foolish and ask: What good do they do for the world? We might as well ask: What good did the Cross do?
After all, only the innocent can understand what sin is. No one until the time of Our Lord ever thought of giving his life to save sinners, simply because no one was sinless enough to know its horrors.
We who have familiarized ourselves with it, become used to it, as a leprous patient after many years of suffering cannot wholly appreciate the evil of leprosy.
Sin has lost its horror; we never think of correlating it to the Cross: we never advert to its repercussions on humanity.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated, needs
but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft,
familiar with her face,
We first endure, then
pity, then embrace. (Alexander Pope.Pope).
The best way to know sin is by not sinning. But Jesus and Mary were wholly innocent — He by nature, she by grace; therefore, they could understand and know the evil of sin.
Having never compromised with it, there were now no compromises to be made. It was something so awful that, to avoid it or to atone for it, they shrink not even from a death on the Cross.
But by a peculiar paradox,
though innocence hates sin because it alone knows its gravity, it nevertheless
loves the sinner. Jesus loved Peter, who fell three times, and Mary chose as
her companion at the foot of the Cross a converted prostitute.
What must the scandalmongers have said of that friendship as they watched Mary and Magdalen ascend and descend the hill of Calvary! But Mary braved it all, in order that, in a future generation, you and I might have hope in her as the Refuge of Sinners. Let there be no fear that she cannot understand our sinful misery because she is immaculate, for if she had Magdalen as a companion then, why can she not have us now?
Dear Mother Immaculate, but seldom in history have the innocent suffered as they do today. Countless Marys and Johns stand beneath the cross guilty of no other crime than that they love the Man on the Cross. If there be no remission of sins without the shedding of blood, then let these innocent victims of hate in Russia, in Spain, and in Mexico be the redemption of those who hate. We ask not that the hateful perish; we only ask that the sufferings of the just be the salvation of the wicked.
Thou didst suffer innocently because thou didst love us in union with thy Divine Son. Thus were we taught, that only those who cease to love ever flee from the Cross. The innocents who are slaughtered today are not the babes of Bethlehem; they are the grown-up children of Bethlehem’s God — men and women who save the Church today as Bethlehem’s babes once saved Jesus.
Be thou their consolation, their joy, their Mother, O innocent woman who binds the sons of men to the Son of God in the unity of the Father and the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen.
— The Rainbow of Sorrow
Jesus wants each one of us to co-redeem in the conversion of humanity through each one’s personal struggle. You and I need to create a civilization of love first in our own persons extending it to the members of our family and then to the society. You and I can only do this with prayer, mortification, and personal effort. Hence I will continue and never tire of reminding each one of us to talk to God about the above topic and His sentiments on the Cross during the quiet time you and I agreed to talk to Him during the day. By transforming ourselves we can transform the world.
With our
personal efforts God will do the rest.
See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and
laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us
together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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