[00:00] Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever. These words that our Lord speaks in today's Gospel are of so great importance. "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." The world tends to separate obedience from love, but true love demands obedience because

[00:33] true love tends toward union of will. We say that even in our common language, human language, when we talk about a family or a social relationship where everyone is perfect in love, we say they are as if one heart and one mind. Love unites. It brings everyone to just be united in their intents and in their will and in their thoughts. And it cannot but be like that between us and God.

[01:04] The more we love Him, the more that should bring us to want to please Him and to act according to His will and to desire His will to be our own. Whereas if I oppose God's will, well, it reveals an imperfection of love. So we need to understand the commandments in this, you know, in the light of love itself. We're not talking about just following a rule book. I have to follow these rules just because I have to follow these rules.

[01:34] And if I don't, it's bad. Well that's true, but that's not the highest motive. The highest motive is a motive of love. "Lord, I want what You want." "I don't want what You don't want." And I know that what You don't want, You don't want it in an arbitrary way. God doesn't just make up the commandments just because He decides what's right and what's wrong. No, the commandments are perfectly conformed to that which He is in His essence. God is truth. He cannot permit or desire or tolerate that which is falsity.

[02:12] God is pure. He cannot want that which is impure. God is life. He cannot want that which is a despisal of life and contrary to life and so forth throughout the commandments. God is divine life. He is the eternal omnipotent God. It's just and right that He desire and demand from us the adoration and worship that is His due as to Him who is the Creator and Father of all.

[02:45] And so we need to recognize the commandments as part, a necessary part of the expression of love toward God. Lord, because we want to love You, we want to conform and freely conform our will to Yours. This is so important. The saints obeyed not only the commandments but every expression of God's will precisely as an expression of love toward Him and not because they considered themselves slaves.

[03:17] They willingly made themselves slaves in the sense that they freely gave their will over to Him and they freely obeyed Him as the expression of this self-giving that love entails. Love is a gift of self for the other. And in this case as creatures and above all as children of God, we're called to manifest, to give this key manifestation of love toward God in obedience to His will. So very important. But then our Lord goes on to say, "I will ask the Father and He will give you another Advocate

[03:51] to be with you always." That which our Lord expects from us, that which He taught us is in fact impossible to put into practice on our own. And in fact He doesn't expect us to do it on our own. He has promised to send the Holy Spirit. We have already received this gift in Baptism and there's been an increase of this gift in Confirmation. What is this gift? It's the gift of sanctifying grace which is basically the presence of the Holy Spirit

[04:24] in the soul. It's the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our souls. And where the Holy Spirit is, the Son and the Father are as well. So there's a whole Holy Trinity by grace dwelling within our souls. This is what we read in the encyclical Divinum Illud Munus which was written by Pope Leo XIII toward the end of the 19th century. This is a quote from this encyclical on the Holy Spirit. "God by grace resides in the just soul as in a temple, in a most intimate and peculiar

[05:00] manner." God resides in the soul. And then he goes on to say, this wonderful union which is properly called indwelling, differing only in conditional state from that with which God embraces the blessed in heaven, is produced by the whole Blessed Trinity. Nevertheless, it is attributed in a special manner to the Holy Spirit. So do you realize what that's saying?

[05:32] The same God, the same presence that sanctifies and is the cause of the beatitude of the souls in heaven is dwelling in our souls if we are in the state of grace. This is precisely what we mean when we talk about the state of grace. It's very important to understand, to make a contrast here between the Protestant understanding of grace and the Catholic, in which that which has been passed down from the apostles, understanding of grace, which is something entirely different.

[06:04] The Protestant understanding of grace is not God dwelling in your soul, but it's just being in God's favor. So we are just acquitted of our sins through the blood of Jesus Christ, and so now we have His favor with God, but there's no recognition of God dwelling in our souls. Whereas we know that it goes far beyond just being reconciled with God. God in fact justifies us and reconciles us with Him by making us partakers of His own

[06:34] life, sharing His very divine life to our souls. This is what sanctifies and justifies from the inside. God's very life transmitted and shared to your soul. This is what divine grace is, and that's precisely what our Lord is talking about when He says in today's Gospel, when He speaks about sending another Advocate who will be with us.

[07:05] "You will know Him because He remains with you and will be in you," He says. This is to be understood in the literal sense, not in some figurative metaphorical sense. If we are in the state of grace, the soul is a temple of the Holy Trinity. And it is in the light of this that we understand the tragedy of mortal sin. That's why we're always here talking about the necessity of fleeing mortal sin, because

[07:35] you're literally expelling God from your soul. That's what a mortal sin is, and we keep saying that. Because when you commit a mortal sin, you're literally kicking God out of your soul in preference for a momentary pleasure. That is literally what you do. So we need to appreciate this immense gift of God dwelling in our souls, and keep in mind that upon this depends everything in our Christian lives.

[08:10] God dwelling in our soul. So the whole call to holiness is based upon this entering into a deeper communion with God who dwells above all here in your soul, if you're in a state of grace. Entering into a deeper communion with Him that's nurtured through the sacraments, nurtured above all through the Eucharist, nurtured through prayer, but it's about entering deeper and deeper into union with Him so that He may transform you, His life may reign in you.

[08:40] And not the other way around, where you're reigning and God is kind of hidden back in a corner, or sometimes even expelled from your soul. He has to be the one who reigns in your mind and in your heart, and in your actions. And so we should be desirous that His, not only that His presence now truly possess us, but that His will considered with ours, or ours considered with His, be tightly united to His, so that He truly reign in us. This is a grace we really need to ask for, with great desire and perseverance.

[09:17] "I will not leave you orphans," says our Lord in today's Gospel. This is something we should ponder on, you know, it ties in exactly what I've been saying now. In fact, He doesn't leave us orphans, He's dwelling in the soul, if we're in a state of grace. He doesn't leave us orphans because He's truly present in the Blessed Sacrament, He's with us through the authority of the Church that He has established, He's with us through His Blessed Mother who is always present to us as mother, He's present to us by grace, He's

[09:48] present to us through His holy word in Scripture, He's present to us in so many ways. The world experiences this sort of loneliness and confusion, this loss of identity and anxiety that comes from just not knowing the why of things, and not having any contact with Him in Whom alone we find the purpose of our existence, but we know that in Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life, we find the highest purpose, the meaning, the identity, our identity as children of God, and all the means to attain the fullness of that union

[10:23] with God. I mentioned that Jesus has asked of us, or He's taught to us the way of salvation and of sanctification, but that He doesn't expect us to do this on our own. Jesus taught us, for example, to forgive our enemies, to live a life that is pure and chaste, to accept our daily cross, to know how to deny ourselves, to be meek, "learn from Me

[10:55] who am meek and humble of heart," said Jesus. We can't do that on our own. We need God's grace. We need the help of the Holy Spirit. We need the help of our Blessed Mother who is spouse of the Holy Spirit and who is always actively collaborating with Him for the sanctification of our souls. And so once again it brings us back to the necessity of cultivating, of sort of being aware of God's presence, cultivating ever more our union with Him so that in Him we find the strength, in Whom alone we can find the strength, to act in a way that is virtuous

[11:30] and conformed to the Gospel, conformed to the commandments. In the second reading today, St. Peter says something very beautiful. He says, "Beloved, sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope."

[12:01] This is something so vitally important in our times where we have, as I mentioned before, society that has lost its identity in a deeper sense. It's lost. It just feels sort of abandoned. So many people are suffering this interior anxiety and confusion and loneliness. And here St. Peter is telling us of the importance of giving witness to the hope that we have within us that comes from knowing the truth, that comes from having Christ's life within

[12:37] us and of knowing the reason, the purpose of our existence and having the full hope, trusting in God's merciful love and help to attain that eternal life with God. So St. Peter, be ready to give a witness to this before the world. How do we do that? Well, we do that just by living faithfully as Christians. There where we are in the midst even of the workplace or in our families, if we are living

[13:11] a life that is entirely orientated toward God and united with Him and we are observing His commandments and we are trying to love Him in everything we do and we are living with a generous exercise of faith, hope, and charity, even if we don't say anything explicitly about our faith in God, that's going to be evident on the outside, especially for those who are further away. They're going to see this person in spite of trials, in spite of difficulties and hardships

[13:44] that turn up, they're always full of hope. They're always peaceful. There's always a joy in their eyes. So there's something deeper, there's something, they've got something that we who are far from God don't have. This is part of the witness that we have to give. It gives credit to the faith, gives credit to the strength that comes from us from living in God and united to Him, whereas if we go around with a long face and we get upset and

[14:16] we blame everyone and just keep having this supercritical attitude toward everyone, which is kind of sort of implicit. Very often nowadays you have this critical, supercritical attitude which implicitly is saying we're okay, the fault is with the others. So it's just this constant occupying oneself with the defects and the failures of the world and of politics and everything, but never really occupying ourselves with our own misery,

[14:50] with our own need for sanctification. So St. Peter is telling us we need to give witness to this joy, this hope that comes from living in God, united to Him, with our minds filled with His truth. So there's always to be a witness to the world. Light is, it's attractive, especially if you're in the darkness. If you're in the darkness, if your mind is in darkness, to see that light that comes

[15:21] from Christ is attractive, and we need to be this light that attracts souls to God. Let us turn to our Blessed Mother, the spouse of the Holy Spirit, she who always dwelt in God and with Whom God was always present in a most special way. She is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the dwelling place of God in a most unique way.

[15:51] So let us ask Her for the grace to be worthy dwelling places of God's presence, to cultivate our union with Him, to flee that which compromises this, especially mortal sin, but any kind of sin, even venial sin, even though it doesn't expel God completely from the soul, it diminishes His presence. So we don't want to make compromises with that either. We want to certainly cultivate this union with God so that the divine grace within us

[16:22] be always increasing and sanctifying us and transforming us into Jesus. Praise be Jesus and Mary. Amen.

[17:03] Amen.