May 2 – Love of God

The rose is divided into various species. The one that blooms in the month of May and is proper of the season, is the one that has more the qualities of a true flower: fragrance, beauty, abundance and variety.

Charity: love of God

The law says: love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. What is this love? Let us search in the garden of God this most fragrant and most beautiful flower. The love in God is like an immense fire in its core and constituent. With the love with which the Father loves the Son, and the Son’s love for us, we have to correspond with this same love. We have to love God because he is infinitely lovable… and any love without God, outside of God, with no regard for God and is against God is an impure love.

Since the love of God is the cause of our loving with pure love and the reason for all our good actions, charity with regards to this first object cannot be represented better than by the queen of flowers, the rose of the month of May. God’s supreme goodness and overwhelming beauty elevates and draws to itself all the affections of the human heart by the sweetest fragrance of his infinite perfection and attributes.

The love of God in Mary

Mary, assisted by the grace and gifts of the Holy Spirit from the moment of her Immaculate Conception, loved God with such an intensity that she drew to her virginal womb, with the sweet and pure fragrance of a mystic flower, the very Son of God, and the Son of the Eternal did not hesitate to take her as Mother, although she was the daughter of Adam, the disobedient.

The fragrant rose to Mary

Our heart is made to love and to love an infinite, immense and eternal object that unites in itself as much perfection that our frail understanding can conceive. Is the love of God present in the garden of your soul? Reflect on it well: search for the rose-bush that grows during May filling up the whole area with sweet odor. Look well for this rose-bush, is it in you? Look well . . .If you don’t find it, you still have time: go to Mary, the gardener and tell her to plant it, to water it and to take care of it in you. Do you love? What do you love? The heart is where love is; where the heart is, there is the whole plenitude and strength of your affections; where these are, there is your whole soul, your thoughts, your faculties, and your senses. Do you love God with a whole heart? Realize that, without this love, you cannot enter heaven.

Lady, take into your hands a bouquet of roses of the month of May:

accept it, it is my love for God my Lord.

From now on, prostrated at the foot of this alter,

I promise you, yes, I have resolved to love God with all my affection.

My joy is that God who is, is supremely good . . .

Without him and outside of him, nothing do I want to love.

I want what God wants, I abhor what God abhors;

God’s will is my will henceforth: thus I have resolved.