to taste and know by love

ecstacy of St Francis
The Ecstasy of Saint Francis by El Greco via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Lord, because you have made me,
   I owe you the whole of my love;
because you have redeemed me,
   I owe you the whole of myself;
because you have promised so much,
   I owe you my whole being.
Moreover, I owe you
   much more than myself
      as you are greater than I,
   For whom you gave yourself
      and to whom you promised yourself.
I praise you, Lord.
Make me taste by love
   what I taste by knowledge;
Let me know by love
   what I know by knowledge.
I owe you more than my whole self,
   but I have no more,
 and by myself I cannot render
   the whole of it to you.
Draw me to you, Lord,
   in the fullness of love.
I am wholly yours by creation;
   make me all yours, too, in love.

St. Anselm, c.1033-1109, Benedictine monk, Archbishop of Canterbury


_________________

I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit.  Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.  And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.  May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s