To desire to love God is to love to desire God, and consequently to love
Him: for love is the root of all desires.
St. Paul says: _The charity of God presses us_.[1] And how does it press us
if not by urging us to desire God. This longing for God is as a spur to the
heart, causing it to leap forward on its way to God. The desire of glory
incites the soldier to run all risks, and he desires glory because he
loves it for its own sake, and deems it a blessing more precious than life
itself.
A sick man has not always an appetite for food, however much he may wish
for it as a sign of returning health. Nor can he by wishing for it obtain
it, because the animal powers of our nature do not always obey the rational
faculties.
Love and desire, however, being the offspring of one and the same faculty,
whoever desires, loves, and whoever desires from the motive of charity is
able to love from the same motive. But how, you ask, shall we know whether
or not we have this true desire for the love of God, and having it, whether
it proceeds from the motions of grace or from nature?
It is rather difficult, my dear sisters, to give reasons for principles
which are themselves their own reason. If you ask me why the fire is hot
you must not take it amiss if I simply answer because it is not cold.
But you wish to know what we have to do in order to obtain this most
desirable desire to love God. Our Blessed Father tells us that we must
renounce all useless, or less necessary desires, because the soul wastes
her power when she spreads herself out in over many desires, like the river
which when divided by the army of a Persian King into many channels lost
itself altogether. "This," he said, "is why the Saints used to retire into
solitary places, so that being freed from earthly cares they might with
more fervour give themselves up wholly and entirely to divine love. This is
why the spouse in the Canticles is represented with one eye closed, and all
the power of vision concentrated in the other, thus enabling her to gaze
more intently into the very depths of the heart of her Beloved, piercing it
with love.
"This is why she even winds all her tresses into one single braid, using it
as a chain to bind and hold captive the heart of her Bridegroom, making Him
her slave by love! Souls which sincerely desire to love God, close their
understanding to all worldly things, so as to employ it the more fully in
meditating upon things Divine.
"All the aspirations of our nature have to be summed up in the one single
intention of loving God, and Him alone: for to desire anything otherwise
than for God is to desire God the less."[2]
[Footnote 1: 2 Cor. v. 14.]
[Footnote 2: Cf. _Treatise on the Love of God_. Book xii. 3.]