After a nun has spent a few years in the monastery, there is not much left but to love.   For some of the Sisters, that truth breaks through quickly and love becomes a life project.

Certainly, there are a few who find something else to do, even there, but the love the sisters share, especially when the Abbess knows how to promote devotion and prosper love, is strong and full.

Postulants must leave their other debts paid when they come into the enclosure, and that is liberating in itself. It would appear that it does not take long “inside” to realize that, having come for the love of God, debts of love toward one another are land mines on the path of devotion to Him, and the “rule” of the house knows how to disarm them.

Shall we all pay a debt of love today? We will come away enriched.

Andreas Cruz photography

         It may surprise us to think that . . . the Abbey has to pay its bills! It has to write a check to the power company, the water works, and there may, in some countries, be certain taxes to pay as well. (In Cor Unum, we are not tax exempt!)

How LOVELY the way our Father explains these things through His servant, Paul:

Romans 13: 6 and 7 . . . For because of this [submission to rightful authority, set in place by God . . . and by faith to do us good] you also pay taxes, for they are God’s ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.

Taxes, custom (tribute), fear and honor! That’s beautiful!

By this accounting, there is scarcely anyone in our lives to whom we do not owe something! Oh my!

Reverence to husbands; honor to wives. Nurture and admonition to children, and friendship to friends. Honor to masters and to parents. It looks, in fact, like the development of honoring dispositions and hearts could take us a long way.

Even taxes, paid honorably, aren’t so much taxes anymore as beneficence and investment in our communities. Remember that admonition to be transformed by the renewing of our minds? Opportunities abound!

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. (Romans 1:19)

Sometimes it seemeth that the heart of our Lord goeth out to us the more upon the field where we lieth the most bloody. Considering the field upon which His blood dropped down, it makes sense!

How MUCH He did not avenge! Insults, day after day, and even as He hung upon a cross, dying a death on falsified charges, as His accusers knew right well.

Intrigues, rejection . . . when we take an historical look at the vengeance earthly kings have often exacted, the idea that the King of all kings, the King before whom all kings will bow the knee, the King by Whom kings reign and who can depose them from on high, the idea that He should be rejected in the smallest degree is nearly ludicrous . . . treason, not to mention the arrest and beheading of His friend and kinsman, all of these and more might have stirred vengeance in His breast, Son of God, Son of Man.

The Divine Comfort does not tell us to “just forget it,” or “get over it,” we have His assurance that the one Who calls us His “beloved” WILL AVENGE.

We do well when we come to terms with His reality: His vengeance for others will so often be toward them what it was for us, that He will send after the offender the hounds of heaven, to track them down as they did us, until they cry out for mercy. Will they not think that heaven has turned its vengeance upon them until Divine Vengeance leads them home? And for this cause, my beloved, we must not interfere in any attempt to exact our own vengeance. When we know, at last, “what spirit we are of,” we will be able to say with every fiber of our being, “Arrest them, Lord! For the sake of Your glory, find them and bind them to the truth of Your mercy and their great need – just as You did for us!”

photo courtesy of Wikipedia

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