[00:00] "I no longer call you slaves, but friends." Friendship requires reciprocity.

[00:33] It is a mutual love between two persons grounded in the good. But when it comes to divine friendship, it requires not only reciprocity, but what St. Thomas Aquinas calls redamatio. Redamatio is Latin for love returned. Divine friendship requires that we return the love that Christ has shown and has given

[01:04] to us. Christ has loved us first. He has given His life and laid down His life for each and every one of us so that we may come into communion, into friendship with Him. So the entire spiritual life is really a redamatio; it's a returning of that love. And the best way to deepen our friendship with the Lord is to deepen our life of prayer.

[01:38] St. Teresa of Avila famously defines prayer as an intimate sharing between friends, spending time alone with the One who we know loves us. To deepen our friendship with the Lord is to deepen our life of prayer, because that is where He reawakens in our soul the redamatio, the love.

[02:10] He enkindles that love and that returning of that love in our prayer. Which He says that the essential condition to deepen our life of prayer is to have a determined determination, meaning we have to choose to go all in. We always have to remember that there is the primacy of grace.

[02:41] Divine initiative always precedes our own actions. He is the one that desires this. So He's the one that gives us the grace. He sustains us in trials, in difficulties, and He is the one that effects that union and communion with Him. However, He needs our yes. He needs our free will to cooperate with His grace.

[03:13] And this is why the essential condition is to have that determined determination, to choose to go all in. May our Blessed Mother help us to return the love of our Lord, to have this determined determination to love Him as He has loved us. As St. Thérèse would say, "love is paid by love alone."

[04:06] Amen.