Program for the New World Order

Writings of Herbert Thomas Schwartz, T.O.P.

Our Lady of Guadalupe
The Maternity of Mary

On Living Therese's Little Way

Do not seek to remove only the symptom, the sin itself which God uses to humiliate you, but seek to remove the cause: seek to love God always, and to hate everything in yourself which is not God.
All have turned out of the way, there is none that doth good, there is not so much as one.
My soul doth magnify the Lord.
Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth, for thy breasts are better than wine.

The love of a father is the spiritual womb of the child. O, if fathers only understood their responsibility, and their power in Jesus!

The Meaning of the Cross:
To Overcome the Misgiving about God's Love for us
Which is the Effect of
The Sin of our First Parents

The Message of Lazarus:
Only as Dead and Stinking in our Sins Are we Able to Rise with Jesus

Dead to Our Sins in Christ,
We Can Rise in Him to New Life

+ M

St. Therese explains that if we are to love one another as Jesus loves us, then it must be Jesus Who loves in each one of us for otherwise we should be unable to love as He loved. But there is this to consider too, that Jesus has told us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. And this is the connection I see, that if we are to love one another as Jesus loves us, and in this way love our neighbor as we love ourselves, then we must begin this love of our neighbor with the Love of Jesus by loving ourselves with the Love of Jesus. This means that we must permit Jesus to love us first - for we can only love ourselves as He loves us by allowing Him to love us with His love - which then becomes ours because It is given to us. And only then can we love our neighbor as Jesus loves him - because we love ourselves as Jesus loves us and it is in this way that we at once love our neighbor as ourselves and love him as Jesus loves him.

Teresita said once that little souls do not have great temptations. The reason is that they do not try to overcome temptation by their own strength because little souls have no trust in their own strength - they just run to the arms of their Father, and Mother, and that is all - they are safe. Yes, little souls overcome temptation by ignoring it because they have boundless trust in the Power of their Father.

After a temptation, when the Enemy tries to renew it by suggesting that one gave one's consent, again the little soul is back in its Father's arms and then it says to its father: "Did I give my consent? I hope not, but it is very likely I did - I am so weak - so now You must love me more because I need You more" - and that is all there is to it. If there is something the little soul should know about itself, who can teach it if not the Father? But if a soul, in this situation, begins to withdraw into itself, in the hopes of proving its innocence, that is the beginning of the end and God could very well permit a great temptation at this point, because such a soul, without realizing it, would be seeking its peace in its own "virtue".

You must not force your love, your love either of Myself or your neighbor! Do you know why it is so wrong, and so displeasing to Me? It denies the Order of God Himself, the Order of the Blessed Trinity. The Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit Who is Love, does not come forth from the Father before Me, Who am Wisdom and Understanding. No! The Holy Spirit of Love proceeds from the Father, the Beginning, only through Me, only through the Understanding of the Father. And so it must be with you! When you are moved by the true desire to love God more, therefore, turn your mind to Us, contemplate in Me the Goodness of the Father. When you see His Goodness in Me, you will be moved spontaneously to love Him, as I love Him, in the Holy Spirit. When you contemplate the Father in Me, My Father becomes your Father, and thus He gives you everything as He gives Me everything. That is how you know His Goodness in Me, not as an abstract, sterile thought, but as receiving It. And in this living knowledge of the Father's Goodness, which you have in Me, you love the Father with Me in the Holy Spirit, even as you are loved by the Father.

Do you see, then, that love is an act of filial gratitude, the spontaneous reverberation of your soul to the Father's giving of Himself to you in Me? This is charity unfeigned, a charity which gives only what it knows it has received. You can see in this too why poverty is the first of the Beatitudes because it is only in your poverty, in the Knowledge that you have nothing in yourself, that you can receive the Kingdom of Heaven from the Father.

Now you will begin to see more and more how your supernatural life is in substance My Life, a Life Which you receive totally from the Father. Yes, you must use your reason very much, as I have told you so many times, your reason enlightened by faith. But you must not use your reason to take the place of Myself, you must use your reason to dispose yourself to receive, with Me and in Me, everything from the Father. The more perfectly you understand the things of God, the more will you be disposed to receive everything from the Father. But when you are disposed to give what you have not received, you are trying to buy God's love with your sins: "Whose hands come bearing gifts, their right hand is filled with sins." Ps 26:10

When I permit you to fall in one way or another, whether it be serious or light, I have only one objective - to draw you to Myself, that you may love Me with greater intensity, knowing what you are in yourself without Me. But in order for your fall to have this effect, two things are necessary: One that you see your own misery, the other that you understand My Goodness, My Merciful Love. And those who do not meditate on My Love, therefore, do not have the strength and the rectitude to face what they are in themselves. Or if they do, it only serves to drive them to despair, as it did Judas, because they conclude that their evil is too much even for God Himself. But for My beloved ones, their falls only serve to strengthen the bond between us. I allow them to fall because I delight in their confidence to see them trusting in Me all the more as they see their own misery: I delight in giving them the grace to trust Me - only because I am good. Ah, if you could know the joy they give Me then.

My beloved child, you tell Me that you cannot love Me as you would unless you feel and experience My Love of you. Do you think that I am less aware of that than you or that I desire your love less than you desire to give it to Me? Why, then, is My Love not manifested to you more? For I am omnipotent, and therefore nothing is lacking on My part to accomplish that which I so much desire. Do you not see that it is because you do not listen to Me as I tell you that I love you? You really do not listen to Me, and that is why you cannot hear what you so much desire to hear, and what your heart needs so much to know.

No, you do not listen to Me. And now I will teach you how to listen. You must understand that, being human, and limited, you can only think of one thing at a time. And I speak to you, deep within yourself, not with the sound of human speech, but spiritually, so very delicately that nothing is easier than for the noise of your own thoughts and desires to drown out My Voice within you.

Do you see, then, how necessary it is for you to be silent with Me, in order to hear the message of love which I speak in your soul? It is true that you do need to be convinced, as you tell Me, that I love you. But what you do not see is how silent you must be within yourself in order to hear Me, to be convinced. But how can you be silent if you are endlessly seeking your peace, your happiness and your joy, in things outside of Me, and therefore by way of your plans, your ideas, your providence? Do you see? That is why mortification is so necessary. It is necessary, not because I need your suffering, but because you need to become detached from the things that you would want, that you would want outside of Me, in order to become absorbed only in what I want, for you. And that absorption in what I want is the interior silence of your soul, in which you hear Me speaking within you, communicating My Love in a way which, inevitably, sweetly, yet forcefully, draws your whole being to My Heart. My child, give Me, therefore this silence of your heart, and let Me speak within you, deep within you, to draw your heart into Mine.

My child, give Me, therefore, this silence of your heart, let Me speak within you, deep within you, to draw your heart into Mine. The fool is always ready to teach: a wise man is always ready to learn - to learn even as he is teaching.

You do not understand My Love! No, you think of My Love as the love of a creature, waiting to receive something from you and thus to give you its love in return. But My Love is not like that. Listen! You must understand Me! You must understand that this very Love Which sustains you in your being at this moment, Which is the Cause of your very existence, the Cause of everything which is yourself, this Love, so intimate to yourself, is waiting, at this very moment, to embrace you, to give you, not your being, but My Being, now. Think of My Divine Impatience - think! Realize that I cannot wait for the next moment to give Myself to you! Is it not strange? I am so concerned to give Myself to you in Love - and you who would want so much to be one with Me, are all withdrawn, filled with misgivings, wondering whether I love you or not! O, if only you would see and understand that your only misgivings should be about your disposition to receive My Love, your capacity to understand the depth and the power of My Love for you! Each moment of your life is My offering you My fresh embrace. Therefore come to Me, come to Me as you are! Think of nothing else! Only to give yourself to Me all - to receive Me, God, your God! Now!

O Jesus, to be poor! Make me poor! Empty me of every attachment and desire outside of Your Heart, that I may, with You, receive everything from the Father, because then, like You, I will have nothing that I have not received, and know that I have received, know that I am receiving, everything from Him.

O Jesus, make my life an unceasing act of receiving everything, as it is an unceasing act of giving everything, of giving myself, to the Father with You, in Mary, by the Love of the Holy Spirit, consumed from moment to moment by that Love, Your Spirit, Who alone makes me acceptable to the Father.

A sensitive conscience is very different from a sick conscience. A sensitive conscience says, "At that time I did this when I should have done that." Then the soul turns to Jesus, with sorrow for the offence, but with joy because He is so Good and Merciful. And then the soul suffers, but quietly and peacefully, knowing it is loved, yet joyfully suffering to pay the price for its offence - actually it is the process of regaining that conformity to God which was lost by the offence. And thus the soul makes a resolution to avoid this and every offence by the grace of God. But a disturbed conscience feels perpetually guilty and, paradoxically, perpetually innocent - because it never sees the objective thing it has done which is wrong. Such a soul is without joy, and with very little hope. It offends God constantly, without changing its habits very much. Of course, to the extent that this state is not subject to deliberation, and to the extent that it was brought on by weakness and ignorance, such a person is able to perform meritorious acts. But it remains true that he is greatly hindered, nevertheless, in his spiritual development, and that he is very much in need of help. But, nevertheless, it is always true that if he is faithful to the grace he receives, the very life of grace will tend to remove this impediment to grace.

The holy conscience is a delicate conscience, constantly judging what conforms or does not conform to God's will, enlightened by Jesus as it is moved more and more to console Him in His agony by receiving His Love, conforming itself more and more to God's will as it received His Love, from moment to moment.

Do you see how much I love you? Do you see how I keep you by My side all day by the trials and temptations I send you? Remember how easy it is for you to forget all about Me, to take yourself for granted as soon as I stop reminding you of your miseries. That is what you must understand - your need of temptation - then your temptations will purify you because you will depend totally on Me when I show you that there is nothing in yourself to depend on. Otherwise the very trials and temptations which are ordered to your perfection and purification, will become an occasion of sin to you - you will feel abandoned by Me just when I am waiting to help you. Remember, in the Gospel, "O ye of little faith!" Mt 8:26

When you have sinned, you feel that I do not love you. What you do not see is that what keeps Me from loving you, and you from believing in My Love, is not the sin, but the lie which denies the sin. When I permit you to commit the same sin repeatedly, the reason is that you have not acknowledged the cause of the sin. What is the cause of the sin? Your desire to rejoice, not in Me, but in yourself. Do not seek, therefore, to remove only the symptom, the sin itself which I use to humiliate you, but seek to remove the cause: seek to love me always, and to hate everything in yourself which is not in Me.

My child, remember always, in your sufferings, that in Me they have only one purpose, to unmask your lies and to open your soul to the Father, that together with Me you may receive everything from Him and glorify Him as I have glorified Him. There are many things to be corrected in your soul, many, many sins and offences to atone for, but everything must be ordered, ordered by love - so that above everything else I want you to know that you are loved, loved with a love of predilection, not so that you may indulge your bad habits, but, the very contrary, that in the knowledge of My Love for you, you will have the strength to hate yourself and correct your evil ways - yet always with only the one motive that you may know My Love for you more and more, and love Me more and more in the Spirit of Truth.

But to receive everything, you must have nothing of your own - that is why you must suffer, to have everything of your own taken away from you, so that you may receive everything as I receive everything.

When you are made aware of a serious defect the danger is that you will be tempted to lose your poverty in the effort to overcome the evil by yourself. It is true that I want you to overcome it, by the strength of your own will - that is how you are justified. Yet it is I Who strengthen your will, so that you must first come to Me and rest in My arms, acknowledging your own evil in the knowledge that I love you, for all your corruption, and that I will overcome this evil in you as I have overcome so many others before this.

Yes, when you see a great defect in yourself which needs to be corrected, remember that there are two things, not one, to be overcome: one, the defect itself, two, the pride by which you would want to overcome the defect in order to take complacency in yourself. I want you to overcome it in order that you may take your complacency more perfectly in Me. That is the end, and you must not let the means become the end - even though it is true that you must not allow your preoccupation with the end to prevent you from using the necessary means. "Rise after you have sat, ye who eat the bread of sorrow." You who follow Me in the way of the Cross, rise to overcome the vices I show you in yourself, but only after you have sat at My feet in contemplation, to know My Goodness, to know My Love for you, to know that I want you to overcome this bad habit only so that I may love you more, so that I may give Myself to you more.

When a baby is distressed, it cries, and then its mother knows it needs help. So it is with yourself and Me. When you are distressed and you cry out to Me, I know it, and I take care of you at once. (Of course it is not because I would not know your distress otherwise! But you would not know it, you would not be open to the love you need from Me.) The mother does not question her baby's disposition - it is enough for her to know that her baby needs help - and neither do I question your disposition. Whatever you need, you must get it from Me, just as the baby must get everything it needs from its mother - so there is no problem. As soon as you come to Me, everything is solved.

When you are moved by excessive fear, the reason is that your peace depends not on My Will, but on some created good which threatens to be taken away from you, which you desire outside of Me, and which you would want under your own control, apart from Me. Realize this as fast as you can, then come to Me and trust Me to take care of you, yes even to the point of protecting you against the evil consequences of your own sins - even to the point of turning them to your advantage.

O Jesus, why am I so pained and disturbed when my dispositions are questioned? There is only one reason - by a hidden impurity my peace depends, not on the disposition the Father gives me through You, to receive everything from Him, my Father, but on a disposition I would find in myself and have of myself.

Therefore I thank you, adorable Father, that You have permitted me to be so disturbed. For in the measure that I was disturbed I needed to be purified. And in the measure that you applied this violence to my stubborn soul, You have loved me, wanting to give me, not only Yourself, but the very disposition by which I was to receive You in Jesus Your Son, in Mary, His Mother and mine.

My trust in Your Mercy, Jesus, is my confidence in the power of my will to do all the things that please You. If I do not trust my will, I do not trust Your Mercy. I can do all things in You because it is You Who strengthen me. (Phil 4:14) Yet it is I who do those things, even as I am in You. Therefore my one preoccupation is to be in You, in Whom alone I will do all the things which will please the Father.

When the evident dislike and disapproval of someone disturbs your peace, the reason is that you feel he sees the evil which you know is in yourself - and you are disturbed, not by the disapproval, but by that secret duplicity which would find its peace in a lie, and which, by My Love, I seek to remove from your soul through the disapproval of others. Thank Me for that disapproval, for that rejection which I inflict on you through others, by meditating on how much your soul needs to be rejected in order to live in Me, the Truth. If you do not meditate on this, in order to penetrate My Love for you, in order to understand It in this experience, you will allow your soul to be depressed and saddened, murmuring against Me as the Jews murmured in the desert even after I had brought them through the Red Sea, saving them from their enemies as I have saved you.

Do you see how necessary it is to think and to meditate on the Law of My Merciful Love in order to realize the actuality of My Love at each moment, even as My Love sends you that cross by which you need to be purified? For if you do not meditate, thereby realizing My Love for you in your suffering, you will turn against My Love because, in the light of your perverse love of yourself, you will be hating me. "Destruction is thy own, O Israel! Thy hope is only in Me." Hosea 13:9

You keep looking into yourself to see if you have what you need to please Me - now happy because you think you have it - now sad because you think you don't. But you do not understand Me - only what is from Me can please Me. Therefore, stop looking into yourself, and look at Me. As soon as you do that, I am pleased.

When you are not actually considering My Love, you are not actually loving Me. Do you know why? Because I am the Thought of the Father, and just as the Holy Spirit of Love proceeds from the Father through Me, so it is that in your actual thought of the Father's goodness, in Me, your love arises to the Father, moved by that same Spirit.

O Jesus, love me, because only Your Love can make me worthy of Your Love!

I love you with your defects - there is only one reason why I hate your defects - because they keep Me from loving you more!

The power of God does not "overcome" temptations - they dissolve in His Love. When do they dissolve? When the soul has learned to receive His Love in the midst of the temptation - when the soul has become a little child who no longer looks for peace and security in its own strength. Jesus loves children because He is the Truth, and only little children are true. How are they true? In their simplicity which expects everything, yes everything, from the Father.

Interior silence is the most eloquent testimony of faith, of a faith that knows it is loved, loved all the more in the very realization of its corruption, in the realization that it has nothing for which it deserves to be loved, a faith that knows that it is loved in the very manifestation of His Love which God chooses to give it at this moment, a faith that wants this and only this, that would chose nothing else, simply because it is God's will to give it this now, a faith that has no eyes for the future because it cannot bear to take its eyes from Jesus now, in a word, a faith that receives everything from the Father, with Jesus, in Mary, because it expects everything from the Father. Do you know why interior silence is the testimony of this faith? It is because that silence is the necessary effect of this faith.

Do you see why you need to suffer injustices, how necessary they are for your sanctification? You are made just by Me, by receiving your justification from Me. But you cannot receive My justification so long as you find your peace in your own. And only I know how attached you are to your self-justification. And only I know how and when to wean you from it. That is the meaning and purpose of the injustices I permit you to suffer. They are medicine for your soul. Under their attack your hidden attachment to your own justification of yourself shows itself in your resentment and your indignation. And then, set free by your anger, your critical spirit begins to attack the person who had offended you. And then, since you are no longer actually loving Me in him, you feel separated from Me - naturally since you are no longer loving Me. (You cannot be loving Me and not loving Me at the same time.)

And then, My beloved child, you realize, in Me, that something is wrong, and in your heart you ask Me to show you why you have lost your peace. And this is what I show you, that all this has happened to you because I love you so much, because I will to remove from your soul any trace of self-righteousness, so that I can fill you with My Righteousness, My Justification, Mine alone, the perfect poverty of your spirit. "Blessed are you when you shall suffer persecution for My sake" Mt 5:10 - yes, for My sake. You are blessed then because, in your meekness, in Me, your anger turns on itself, and becoming indignant, not with others, but with yourself - seeing how much you are disposed to attack Me in others to justify yourself. And then, being emptied of self-love and self-justification, you are filled with My Love and My Justification. And so your reward in heaven will be very great. But not only in heaven, for already, on earth, you have the reward of happiness in My Peace which I give you.

And here is something which I wrote recently in a letter to one of my children, which I think may be helpful to you:

"... by habit you live, not by faith, but you live by your imagination. There are, of course, many psychological reasons for this, and it will help to see those, in the right order; but the essential point is that you must 1) recognize that you have not been living very much by faith, 2) that it is wrong not to, and sinful, 3) that you are able to, because God gives, infallibly, the grace you need to do what He asks, 4) you will never be happy until you consecrate yourself to this one thing, to live by faith. What does it mean "to live by faith?" First of all you have to realize that faith is a virtue that exists in your reason. That means that the operation of faith is an operation of reason - "As a thing is, so does it act." And therefore when you allow your reason to judge contrary to the Faith, you are sinning against Faith. There are, of course, many facets of the Faith, but the chief one for you (and it seems to me for almost everyone today) is to believe that God loves and provides what you need to love Him in this life and to be with Him forever in the next life. and it seems to me that you habitually judge the contrary, that you are not loved, and that you are not provided for.
It seems to me that the chief reason, psychologically, for this state of mind is your feeling of guilt, your deep conviction that, if the truth were really known, you do not deserve to be loved, and therefore it is inconceivable that God loves you, since God knows all the truth about you. And this means that your difficulty, basically, is a false conscience, and that you must, therefore, rectify that false conscience, and you must give the work of that rectification everything you have, because your happiness in this life and in the next depends on this. It is not a question of one detail or another: No, this is the crisis of your whole life. ..... Here, then is what I want you to do: You must take arms against your own thought, realizing that it is motivated by your imagination, which in turn, is motivated by that feeling of guilt, that you do not deserve to be loved. You must understand that in this way your practical intellect has been deformed, that is, therefore, quite contrary to the Faith, BECAUSE YOUR RATIONAL CONVICTION, THE ONE BY WHICH YOU LIVE AND ACT FOR THE MOST PART, IS THAT GOD LOVES A PERSON BECAUSE HE DESERVES TO BE LOVED. AND THAT IS WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
God loves a person because He wills to love him, ultimately, and ANYTHING THAT ANYONE DOES WHICH MAKES HIM WORTHY OF GOD'S LOVE IS ITSELF THE EFFECT OF GOD'S LOVE. The Blessed Virgin herself is lovably only because of what God has done to her. Those are her very own words "because He Who is Mighty has done great things to me." Lk 1:49 And you must see, therefore, that this is the teaching of Jesus and His Church - "I have chosen you, you have not chosen Me." 1Jn 4:10 And you must see, therefore, how vitally, practically, in the concrete things that you do through the day (every human act is an act of reason), you judge and act by a principle contrary to that, namely that God is not loving you because you do not deserve to be loved. And seeing that you do this, and that it is wrong and sinful, you must resolve to change just this, to do violence to yourself in this very matter ("The kingdom of heaven suffers violence" Mt 11:12) - and you must really fear, with an efficacious, objective fear, that your failure to do this will lead to your destruction, because it really will."


© 2007 All Rights Reserved Laura Jones