When most people hear the word, "passion", they often tend to think about 'passionate encounters', the kind you see in bad romance movies or in contemporary T.V. shows (unfortunately). Those things are all about the emotional fires that spark when two lovers meet, although this is usually not what happens in that kind of situation. However, these products of our emotion-driven world do have a small part of truth that, although small in these, is of incredible important: Passion is like a fire, a fire that can consume everything if lived with incorrectly. But if lived with correctly, according to its purpose, can bring two true lovers together in a stronger bond than before. The perfect and most amazing example of this is history's most famous act of passion: The Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The word "passion" comes from the Latin verb "patere", which means "to suffer". Passion for something or someone means suffering for that thing or person, giving oneself completely, life and, in the case of our Lord and His martyrs, death sometimes. In our present times, people focus a lot on "feeling passion", feeling that rush of living for something or someone more than anything/one else, and it ends up consuming them in a flash-fire a lot of the time, turning their life upside down. A lot of wasted time is spent trying to keep that "passion" going so we can keep feeling the rush. But this isn't what real passion is: Passion is suffering for the beloved, it's sacrificing for them, just like our Lord did for us, and it's meant to be lived with continence, with caution and purpose.
When our Lord Jesus took up His Cross, and even before that when He endured the crown of thorns and the beating and the scourging, He was living passionately for both the Father and for us, and it wasn't a quick consuming flash-fire; it was His suffering for His beloved, living and dying for our redemption. His suffering up to and including His crucifixion were how He lived out His love for us and the Father, and it was how the Father was able to draw us closer to Him in love. It was the most important and perfect thing He could do for us; "No greater love has one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" John 15:13. Christ lived and died for us in the greatest act of love that was possible, not in some cheap and quickly-extinguished way, but in His entire life and death.
So the question is: What should we do as the Bride of Christ? We're obviously called to be passionate about Him, about knowing Him and serving Him, but how? Most of us probably won't die for Him like He did for us, like the martyrs did for Him, but we were all made with our own ways of living for Him. I write poetry, friends of mine play music, others were given the gift of evangelization, and others still with other gifts. Yet there is a common rule in all of the ways that we have to live passionately for Him: Living, sacrificing, SUFFERING for our Lord God should, above all, be for Him alone.
We often get distracted by a lot of other things and people, and often we can have that rush of burning emotions for them, but we can't really live for them fully, because they can't fill our lives fully. However, God can, and in fact, He wants to! Because of this, He enables us to live and suffer for Him in fullness, to live truly passionately for this One Who we should live our whole lives for, in the purpose of falling more deeply in love with Him and serving Him more and more.
All you holy men and women, especially all you martyrs, please pray for us!
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