Love in Freedom

“Remain in my love.” (Jn 15:9)

A word from our Cistercian Mother Beatrice of Nazareth on how love sets us free:

“The Sixth Mode of Love
When our Lord's bride has come further and ascends higher into greater piety, she feels another mode of love in a closer understanding and a higher knowledge. She feels that love has overcome all her opponents within her and has made good her defects. Love has mastered her knowing and allowed her to receive the free disposal over herself without opposition so that she holds her heart in safety, she experiences it in rest and she does what is to be done in freedom.

When she is here she thinks all things small and everything that belongs to the dignity of love is light to do or leave undone, to endure or to suffer. It is pleasing for her to exercise herself in love. Then she experiences a God-like power, bright purity, a spiritual sweetness, delightful freedom, an understanding wisdom and a pleasurable affinity with God.

Then is she like a housewife who governs her house well. She arranges it wisely and orders it beautifully. She concerns herself with it providently and prudently keeps it, working with understanding. She acts inside and outside, doing or leaving undone as she wills. So it is with such souls. Love powerfully and effectively rules within, working and resting, doing and leaving undone, outside and inside as it wills.

She is like a fish that swims in the breadth of the water and rests in the depths. She is like a bird that flies in the spaciousness and height of the sky. Thus she experiences her spirit as walking unbound in the depth and spaciousness and height of love.

The power of love has drawn and led the soul, has guarded and protected her. It has given her the prudence and wisdom, the sweetness and courage of love. Nevertheless it has hidden the power of the soul until the soul has come into greater heights so that she is totally free from herself and love reigns more powerfully within her.

Then love makes the soul so bold and free that in doing and not doing, in working and in rest she does not act from fear of any human being or demon or angel or saint or even from fear of God himself. She experiences well that love is within her and is effectively working as much in her bodily rest as in many works. She knows well and experiences that where love reigns there is more to it than work or suffering.

All those that will to come to love must seek it with fear and follow it faithfully and exercise it with desire. They must not spare themselves in great works and in many sufferings and in enduring difficulties. They must deem all small things great until they come to the point where love reigns within them and becomes so powerful that it makes all things small and all works easy and every pain is softened and debt is paid.

This is freedom of conscience, sweetness of heart, goodness of mind, nobility of soul, lightness of spirit and the beginning of eternal life. This is already an angelic life and after it follows eternal life. May God, in his goodness, give it to us all.”

Seven Modes of Love, 6 (Trans Michael Casey, OCSO)